Mailchimp is an email marketing software that gives you a number of options for designing and sending emails. It is currently free for up to 500 contacts and for up to 1,000 emails each month (correct February 2023).
At iKnow we enable you to syncronise your iKnow Church contacts with MailChimp to allow your church to send out emails to the whole church, a circle or certain types of people.
MailChimp have a great help section (https://mailchimp.com/help/) but this guide will show what you need to do in iKnow to link your iKnow church contacts to your MailChimp account.
If you do not already have a MailChimp account then you will first need to set one up. During the set up process you will be asked if you want to import data. You do not need to do this at this stage as we will syncronise your contacts from iKnow.
Once you have your MailChimp account set up you need to create a new Audience (Create a Mailchimp Audience: https://eepurl.com/dyilbz).
We would recommend calling this “iKnow list” or something similar.
Please Note
If you already have a MailChimp Audience you will still need to use this Audience for your contacts from iKnow, unless you are using a paid MailChimp account that allows multiple Audiences.
When you are setting up your Audience you will be asked to remind people how they became part of the Audience. You might want to enter "You signed up for information and news from Your Church Name".
Next you need to create an API key. This is a code that enables iKnow and MailChimp to speak to each other. MailChimp has a helpsheet to explain how to get an API key which you can find here: About API Keys: https://eepurl.com/dyijVH
Please note that you need to click on “Create a Key” and not “Create a Mandrill API key”. Once you have your API key select and copy it.
Go back to iKnow and go to the Settings module. Click on the MailChimp icon within the Settings module and paste the API code into the box.
You will be asked, in Step 2, to select the correct list for your contacts to syncronise to. Ensure you select the 'iKnow List' we created earlier. Your iKnow account and MailChimp account will now be linked but please note, the lists are only updated overnight so will only be synchronised with MailChimp at 3am the following day.
Once your contacts are syncronised you can create your first campaign. When you create a new campaign you will see that you can choose to send it to the iKnow list or you can create a segment of this list if it needs to only go to a select group of people, for example, only those over 18, only the women or only those from one location. For more information on creating a segment take a look at this helpsheet: Getting Started with Segments: https://eepurl.com/dyilO5
Please Note
Adding people to the Audience in MailChimp will not add them to iKnow.
Only those with contact type Church, who have an email address and have agreed to be contacted by email will be syncronised across to MailChimp.