How to Integrate SlickText With Mailchimp
Marketing integrations make your life easier.
When all of your software talks to each other, you cut down on your workload and are able to more intelligently interact with and pursue leads.
At SlickText, we offer dozens of integrations. One of the most common questions we get is, “Do you integrate with Mailchimp?” The answer is yes — and it’s actually been that way for years. Email is complimentary to most organizations’ text message marketing strategies so having a smooth way to collect customer email addresses is important.
Here’s a quick tutorial on how to integrate SlickText and Mailchimp and get people to join by text.
1. Make sure you have a SlickText and Mailchimp account.
The obvious first step is to have your SlickText and Mailchimp accounts up and running. Both services offer free plans that you can get started with if you are small, just getting started, or want to test the waters out before committing to anything.
2. Give SlickText permission to talk to Mailchimp
Once you have your two accounts up and running, our first step will be taken inside SlickText. We need to give your SlickText account permission to talk to Mailchimp. To do this, you want to click on your name in the top right-hand corner of your dashboard and then select “My Integrations”.
From there, you will be taken to a page that shows you all of your existing integrations. At the bottom of that list, click “Find an Integration”. This will take you to a list of all available integrations for your account. Find Mailchimp in the list and click the “Integrate” button. This will take you to a secure page that will ask you to log in with your Mailchimp email and password. Once you’ve successfully logged in, this gives SlickText the ability to send data over to your Mailchimp account.
3. Enable email capture for a textword within SlickText
Now that we have SlickText successfully talking to Mailchimp, the next step is to turn on email capture for one or more of the textwords in your SlickText account. Navigate to the “Textwords” page in your dashboard, find a textword that you want to capture emails with, click “Options” on the right, and then select “Settings”.
On the next page, on the left, locate “Email Capture” and click on it. This takes us to where we will enable our email capture feature and begin asking people for their emails when they opt in / send your textword to your SMS short code.
Once on the email capture page, click on the switch on the right to turn the feature on. This will expose some additional settings that need to be configured before you can start capturing emails.
The first field you need to fill out is your “email auto-reply”. This is the text message that will be sent to each user after they text in. This reply comes right after your initial auto reply and is what asks them for their email. Here you’ll politely ask them for their email address; maybe even in exchange for a special offer if you’re using this for marketing.
The next field is your “email confirmation”. This is the confirmation text message that they will get after they have successfully provided their email address. Here you’ll want to thank them for giving you their email and if you’re using it for marketing, deliver on that promise of a special offer mentioned in your last message to them.
The last item you’ll see on the page is for your Mailchimp integration. This section will only appear if you have a current active integration with Mailchimp. We obviously do as we just set one up in the previous step. Here we’ll provide a dropdown of all of your existing lists found inside your Mailchimp account.
Simply select the list you want to send your collected emails to. If you want to create a new one, feel free to do so within your Mailchimp. Note that you may have to click “Refresh Lists” after creating a new list. This causes us to re-ask for your freshest list of lists.
Once you have selected a Mailchimp list to funnel your captured emails into, click “Save Settings”. After you’ve done that, all new emails captured within SlickText will be subscribed to the Mailchimp list you’ve selected in real-time. This includes emails that are captured via text to join, SMS surveys, and manual entry.
Easy huh? It’s also worth noting that SlickText is a leading mass texting service. In addition to people’s emails, you also have their phone number and can reach them on their mobile devices as well.
Other Important Info
There is some other additional info about our integration with Mailchimp that you should know…
- Sometimes the email sync is delayed by a few minutes. This is due to Mailchimp’s “email verification process”. They take some time to validate the emails before they appear on your list. Know that we send your captured emails to Mailchimp immediately.
- You can use our texting surveys to capture emails as well. If email capture is turned on and set up to send emails to Mailchimp, any emails collected via a survey will also be sent. If you are capturing names in your surveys, that information will also be sent.
- SlickText stores a copy of all emails collected on our side as well. In case you ever need to download your emails, you can do so from the contacts page in your dashboard.
- Any emails that were previously collected through SlickText will not be synced with your Mailchimp list once you set things up. They only start syncing after you have completed your integration. If you have already collected emails before you set up the integration, you will have to download them all and upload them into your Mailchimp account.
- You can choose a different Mailchimp list to sync with on a per textword basis. In other words, if you have 5 different textwords, you can choose a different Mailchimp list for each word.
Troubleshooting your integration
In a perfect world, you shouldn’t have any issues. Unfortunately, we don’t live in a perfect world. Most people don’t run into issues after they’ve set their integration up however issues occasionally arise. If that’s the case, on the “My Integrations” page in your SlickText dashboard, there is a link called “Error Log” that you can click to view any issues or errors that Mailchimp has alerted us to. You can use this information to fix any problems that may arise.
As always, if you are stuck on anything, reach out to our customer support team for help!
