How to Integrate your Refer a Friend Program with MailChimp

Gather has a fantastic integration with MailChimp allowing you to dynamically add data points to emails you send to advocates and their friends. For example, with Gather’s integration with MailChimp, you send personalised updates to Advocate’s documenting their progress through your reward program.

In this article we show you how to integrate Gather with your existing MailChimp account and also the additional benefits of integration.

1. How to Integrate with MailChimp

2. Adding MailChimp Subscribers as Advocates

3. Additional Benefits

1. How to Integrate with MailChimp

Integrating your Gather and MailChimp accounts is simple.

Head to the ‘Integrate’ section in your Gather account and under ‘Data & Syncing’. Click on the ‘Connect with MailChimp’ button.

Clicking on the button will take you to MailChimp where you will be asked to login to give Gather permission to access your MailChimp account.

Once permission is received Gather goes to work to retrieve your existing MailChimp lists and tags and these will update under MailChimp as seen below.

Please wait a few minutes to refresh your page to allow Gather to fetch the information.

Now you can select which list you would like to connect to Gather from the drop down list.

You can also choose which tag or tags you want Gather to assign to the emails it pushes to MailChimp.

If you make changes in MailChimp or add new tags you can update the information in Gather by clicking on the ‘Fetch Data from MailChimp’ button.

Remember to Save Changes!

*Please note that if your MailChimp account has fields marked as required for the audience that you are connecting to, the sync will only work if those fields are also collected by your referral program. You can update the required merge fields for your audience in your MailChimp audience settings.

2. Adding MailChimp Subscribers as Advocates

An advanced feature of Gather, most suited to those who wish to launch a campaign with an existing, active, subscriber-ship, is allowing Gather to add MailChimp subscribers as advocates.

Gather will fetch all the subscribers which you have in a list and will create them in Gather as Advocates. Each advocate will be given a unique trackable URL link which Gather will push to MailChimp. You can then email your existing subscribers their unique trackable URL which they can share with their friends.

3. Additional Benefits

When a new referral takes place, Gather pushes to MailChimp a number of merge fields which are unique to your advocates and their friends.

Examples of the merge fields include:

• Subscriber name

• Subscriber email address

• Number of successful referrals made

• Current reward tier

• Remaining referrals until tier completed

The personalised merge field data Gather provides to MailChimp gives you the ability to supply your subscribers with personalised, dynamic data.

For the referred friends records on Mailchimp, Gather syncs the the email address of the referrer, making it easier to personalise your messages to subscribers.

With all this data sent to Mailchimp you have the ability to give your advocates a sense of progress when they receive your eDMS’s or email newsletters. Let us look at how you can do so:

• When Gather syncs your first email with Mailchimp, it will push with it the merge fields we mentioned above. To be specific, here they are:

  • Gather Signup URL - merge field variable: SI_URL

  • Gather Referral - merge field variable: REFERRAL (this is always marked as: ‘referred_on_gather’)

  • Referred by Advocate? - merge field variable: REFERRAL

  • Referrer Email - merge field variable: R_EMAIL

  • Advocate? - merge field variable: REFERRER

  • No. Successful Referrals - merge field variable: S_RFRLS

  • No. Pending Referrals - merge field variable: P_RFRLS

  • No. Referrals Left to Current Tier Completion - merge field variable: R_COMP

  • Current Tier Name - merge field variable: C_TIER

  • Referrer Unique URL - merge field variable: R_U_URL

  • Referrer Invitation Page URL - merge field variable: I_P_URL

• When you write your eDMS or newsletters, you can incorporate those merge fields, where Mailchimp will then substitute their values for each subscriber. This will make each and every email newsletter or eDM you send to your audience personalised with their referral program progress. This type of updated personalised content is used by the likes of Morning Brew, the Hustle and other popular newsletters.

Here are a couple of examples for how you would typically use those Gather tags with Mailchimp:

Example 1 - Show the advocate how many friends they have referred so far in emails sent from Mailchimp

Here we make use of Mailchimp’s scripting, using IF & ELSE. What we are telling Mailchimp here is:

If the number of successful referrals is greater or equal to 0 then display:

YOU HAVE REFERRED (number of successful referrals) FRIENDS SO FAR

REFER & GET MORE REWARDS (a link to the advocate’s dashboard)

otherwise, display this instead:

You have referred 0 friends so far.

REFER AND GET MORE REWARDS ( a link to the advocate’s dashboard)

Below is the code you can use for that:

Example 2 - Show the advocate an image of the reward tiers in the Mailchimp emails you send

Now if you want to take this to the next level and display an image, representing a reward tier image to which your advocate is close to unlocking. You can write something like this in your Mailchimp emails:

You can get creative with this, using Mailchimp’s conditional merge fields. For more information on conditional merge fields refer to Mailchimp’s help article here on conditional merge fields.

Got any questions? Check out the help articles here at academy.