Salesforce, though it is known for sales process management, is also a very powerful marketing tool. So much so that salesforce has a complete product suite aimed at marketing called Marketing Cloud, that comes with robust marketing automation features. Email marketing is also an essential part of salesforce marketing cloud with cool 1-to-1 and mass mailing feature set. However, it has one huge limitation.
Why integrate Salesforce with Email Service Providers
The biggest limitation is that you can do only a limited number of mails through native salesforce marketing cloud, 1000 per day to be exact, and that also if you have the unlimited or performance editions.
For those enterprises and products who have very limited transactional mails per day, this limit is fine, but for marketing purposes, especially for those type of products that have a subscriber base in hundreds, thousands, this limit is woefully low.
And this is where third party email service providers(ESP) and email delivery tools come in. They let Salesforce manage stuff like contact management, campaign list creation, etc, and the ESP take care of things like email delivery and web hooks tracking. Not only that, if your ESP has features like campaign management, unsubscribe list management, click and open tracking, bounce email, etc., then you get to use them all. And with some cleverness you can also import this data to Salesforce automatically as well.
There are many different email marketing services out there, each of them with really competitive feature set and popularity. However based on our experiences, two definitely stand out – Mailchimp and Sendgrid.
Mailchimp is a complete email marketing automation tool with so many features that it can stand alone as a complete marketing tool. Sendgrid on the other hand, is simple email service and email delivery provider that focuses on bulk mail delivery. Both are hugely popular on their own, and both are used by enterprises and startups alike.
Integrating them with Salesforce is not very difficult as well. Here’s how you can do just that.
Integrate Salesforce with Mailchimp
You can integrate Mailchimp with salesforce via two ways – The app way or the API way. The first requires a simple installation and configuration of an app in Salesforce, while the latter require custom coding to leverage Salesforce and Mailchimp APIs for interlinking. The app way though not as flexible as custom API based integration, is still adequate for most use cases. So here’s how you can integrate Salesforce and Mailchimp through the app.
Install and Configure App in Salesforce
- Step 1: The first step is to install the app. You can find the app easily at Salesforce AppExchange or you can go to the link here.<https://appexchange.salesforce.com/listingDetail?listingId=a0N3000000B3byfEAB>
- Step 2: Once you have installed the app you would now have to add Mailchimp sections to your lead/contact layouts. Goto Setup->[Leads/contacts/]->Feilds->Layouts.
- Step 3: In Layout designer goto Visualforce Page
- Step 4: Drag and Drop MembershipContact section to your layout. If you are wondering where MembershipContact section came from, it was created by the Mailchimp app that you installed.
- Step 5: For Professional and Group edition users, you would also have to add MC Subscriber field from the Fields section in Layout designer.
- Step 6: You can also change the fields available in search layout. To do that navigate to Setup->[Leads/contacts/]->Feilds->Search Layouts.
- Step 7: Move the Mailchimp Subscription field to the Selected Fields section.
- Step 8: Dont forget to hit save at every process.
Configurations In Mailchimp
- Step 1: Login to your Mailchimp Account
- Step 2: Go to MailChimp and open the Accounts Panel.
- Step 3: Click on Integrations-> Salesforce
- Step 4: Click connect. This will open salesforce authentication login page.
- Step 5: Logging in will redirect you to the integration page. If you see the success message, then everything went right and you now have a successful integration. Else, repeat the process.
Import Contacts from Salesforce
So now that we have integrated the two, let’s import the contacts (or leads if you want) to mailchimp.
- Step 1: Go to list pages in MailChimp
- Step 2: Create a new list. Then on the dropdown next to the list choose import.
- Step 3: Click on integrated services.
- Step 4: You will get a list of services that you can integrate to MailChimp. Select Salesforce out of the list.
- Step 5: Now you would have to do the mapping. Go to Import Fields setup and choose the SFDC fields that you want to add. Click import and map Salesforce fields with MailChimp list fields ds. Click review and then Import.
- Step 6: If you want a new list of different contacts, repeat the process.
That’s not all
Connecting MailChimp Account with salesforce will add tracking options to your campaign builder that will give your connected solution the ability to keep track of subscribers/prospects. You would have to turn on tracking Campaign Stats and/or Member Activity under the Salesforce tracking options. This is all in addition of all other campaign information that is synced with Salesforce in realtime.
The Tracking Campaign Stats will create and sync with a campaign in salesforce thought the process has a two day to avoid constant unload and update from MailChimp’s side. Any campaign member activity is attached as a note in the contact automatically, and can be monitored using Notes and Attachments section in Salesforce.
However, you may have to export and import new subscribers in Salesforce if your subscriber list is built in Mailchimp.
References: Mailchimp, Salesforce developer forum, Mailjet, Sendgrid, Github, Vtldesign
Pratyush Kumar
