I’ve been asked alot lately in my Mailchimp classes how Mailchimp may be used to manage event invitations and attendee communication. There are very good event management services available (e.g. I use Eventbrite) however some people want to use Mailchimp alone.
Mailchimp is a marketing platform and isn’t designed to manage and track event invites and attendees. Even so, Mailchimp can be used with success for more simple events. Below I give instructions to achieve the following:
- Invite participants and prompt a click to respond.
- Send a confirmation email campaign to respondents that reply in the affirmative.
- Add a tag to recipients that will attend the event.
Time needed: 30 minutes
These steps, to be completed in Mailchimp, will send an event invitation, follow up with an automated email message when the recipient responds then tag all attendees.
- Add people that you’ll invite into your Mailchimp audience.
- Design your survey landing page.
Mailchimp provide further instructions.
- Create a Regular email campaign. This will be the invite for your event that you’ll send to invitees.
- Where you want people to respond add Mailchimp survey merge tags into a text block (the wording may be amended as needed).
Example survey merge text and tags to be inserted is:
Will you attend?
|SURVEY: Yes|
|SURVEY: No| - Send the invite.
- Create a new Tag in Mailchimp called “Will Attend”.
- Create an Automation email campaign. When you see the “Create an Automation Email” screen click the “Custom” button.
- On the next screen enter your Audience name and call the Automation whatever is meaningful for you.
- Click “Edit” next to “1 day after subscribers are manually added to workflow”. Click “Change Trigger” then “Campaign Activity”.
- Click “Opened Campaign” then change the delay to 1 hour.
- In “Settings”, “Sent” click your invite campaign name.
- Click the “Update Trigger” button.
- Click “Edit” next to “Filter by segment or tag”.
- Select “Choose Segment or Tag” and click “Contacts match the following conditions”.
- Change “Date added” to “Poll / Survey Activity” and change “Any Response” to “Yes”.
- Click the “Save Segment” button.
- Click “Add” next to “Post-send action”.
- Click “Choose Post-send Action.
- Change “Update merge field” to “Add Tag”.
- Select the “Will Attend” tag. Click “Update Action”.
- Design the email campaign that people that reply that they will be attending will receive and enable the campaign.
You have now sent an email campaign inviting people to attend your event. An hour after the recipient opens the email campaign, and if they have clicked that they will attend, a confirmation email will be sent to them and their contact record (in your Mailchimp Audience) will be updated with the “Will Attend” Tag.
Leave a ReplyCancel reply