For those of you not in the know, MailChimp is a really fun do-it-yourself email marketing service that lets you send email newsletters, manage subscriber lists and track campaigns. Last year, the developers over at MailChimp worked out a way to catch new data into their subscriber list automatically using Wufoo’s ability to serve secure RSS feeds of new entries. While [their approach](http://www.mailchimp.com/blog/wufoo-form-integration-with-mailchimp/) was a much better alternative to the older method of exporting data from Wufoo and importing the email addresses in bulk into MailChimp, it’s based on a system that has to periodically ask and check our servers to see if there was any new data in Wufoo.
Since our feeds only show the last 10 entries at any one time, if the polling is less frequent than the number of new entries collected in the interval, then the subscriber list could miss out on some new entries collected in Wufoo. Because we want to help make this process work better and more reliably between our users, we’ve stepped up our side of the game thanks to our new real time notifications to MailChimp.
Integrating your Wufoo form with MailChimp is now so much simpler. Just go to the [Notification Settings](https://help.wufoo.com/articles/en_US/kb/Notifications/) for a form that’s collecting email addresses you want to add to a subscriber list and then follow along with Tim in this screencast:
With this new integration, you’ll be able to easily transition between collecting emails and contact information with Wufoo and getting in touch with those people in mass. This is all made possible thanks to our [integration platform](http://www.wufoo.com/2010/01/20/send-real-time-updates-from-wufoo-to-your-favorite-web-apps/), which lets you use our push system to instantly send new data to MailChimp as it comes in to your Wufoo form. This new integration comes with an intuitive field matching interface to associate any custom fields you’ve setup in MailChimp with data collected from your forms and the ability to only send these entries to MailChimp based on whether a user checks a checkbox on the form.
Please note that this integration **does not** allow you to export emails and entries that have already been collected through your form. It only works on entries after the integration is set up. Past entries would still need to be exported from Wufoo and then imported into MailChimp via CSV.
Integration with MailChimp is available to all users across all plans and so we hope you upgrade your integration method to our new system. Thanks go out to the brilliant monkeys over at MailChimp for hosting such a fine API. We’re really excited about this integration and hope you’ll enjoy the more seamless interaction. If you want to learn more about how to integrate Wufoo’s real time notifications with other great web applications, check out our [integration documentation](https://help.wufoo.com/articles/en_US/kb/Integrations/).
Comments
It seems great, and wufoo was able to find my Mailchimp account and the right form… but of the four Mailchimp fields I have, wufoo only offered three to match.
What gives?
Posted February 8th, 2010 by Tod Maffin.Hi Tod, because there was no way to keep the wufoo and MailChimp multi-value fields in sync, we decided that wufoo will only match single-value MailChimp fields. So, this means no Checkbox or DropDown from the MailChimp side.
This does not, however, prevent you from segmenting on a wufoo Multi-Value field. You can still assign a wufoo Checkbox or Drop-Down to a text merge field in MailChimp and segment based on the known wufoo values.
Posted February 8th, 2010 by Tim Sabat.Okee dokee. 🙂
Posted February 8th, 2010 by Tod Maffin.That’s brilliant! Needed the extra ‘only send if choice is checked’ option as had issues with check-boxes to opt in/out of newsletter sign up.
Thanks guys 🙂
Posted February 8th, 2010 by Jonathan.Hi. I really like the new Mail Chimp integration too. Thank you! It would be great if in future versions the Mail Chimp opt-in confirmation email to the user could be integrated into this too. Right now the email address goes directly into the Mail Chimp email list without having the user confirm that they would like to be added.
Posted February 8th, 2010 by Jeremy.Thank you again!
Any ideas on how use the Interest Fields (“Groups”) Feature in Mailchimp?
Posted February 8th, 2010 by Mike Watkins.@Jeremy. That’s worth looking at. Thanks for the feedback.
Posted February 8th, 2010 by Tim Sabat.@Mike. Groups are not included right now, so only custom fields for MailChimp are matchable. Hopefully this will not limit you too much. We’ve found that anything you can do with groups, like segmenting, you can also do with Custom Fields. Have you found anything we’ve missed there?
Posted February 8th, 2010 by Tim Sabat.hi! i would love the functionallity that @jeremy talk about: the mailchimp opt-in confirmation email… that’ll be great!! 🙂
Posted February 8th, 2010 by yubi.@yubi, since you AND @jeremy asked for it, I added that. 😉
The new functionality is live but not announced yet. We did a ‘silent push’ of sorts… You’ll see a checkbox that says ‘send opt-in email’ in your MailChimp integration. We’ll shout about it on the blog when we’re ready to tell the world.
Posted February 8th, 2010 by Tim Sabat.hi @tim! that’s great!!! thanks a lot! 🙂
i was testing it but i don’t know if i’m doing something wrong or you guys are just finishing up the integration…. it works if i don’t check that option… are you still working on it?
Posted February 8th, 2010 by yubi.thanks!
@tim… never mind…. my ISP connection was slow… is working perfect! 😀
Posted February 8th, 2010 by yubi.anyway to send out an email with a wufoo form embedded in it so no clicks are necessary for the subscriber?
Posted February 8th, 2010 by Michal.@Michal, read this article from our friends at Campaign Monitor to see why the link is required in an email and embedding is a bad idea: http://www.campaignmonitor.com/resources/entry/674/using-forms-in-email/
Posted February 8th, 2010 by Kevin Hale.wufoo does not support integration with Mail Chimp databases that contain Multi-Choice fields. What gives. This is a common feature used by a large segment of Mail Chimp’s clients. What’s the point of wufoo if it only does a little of the work that’s needed?
Posted February 8th, 2010 by Warren Noble.Any chance wufoo will connect to mailchimp groups in the near future. i test drove wufoo and liked it but decided i can’t sign up till it support groups.
Posted February 8th, 2010 by Tom.I’m with Warren and Tom. I signed up for wufoo only to find that I can’t use all the questions types because there is no way to transfer the information. Sadly I think I’ll have to go back to using the MailChimp sign up form instead….
Posted February 8th, 2010 by Heather.Agreed, much needed feature is the ability to use all question types and integrate with Mailchimp
I want to grow the profile of my users and would love to use wufoo as the base form
Posted February 8th, 2010 by Michael Cohen.@Machael, @Heather, @Tom, @Everyone…. 😉
MailChimp just recently made the API changes required to make your request a reality. We’re planning to add this feature sometime in the near future.
Posted February 8th, 2010 by Tim Sabat.We now have full support for MailChimp’s merge tags and interest group features! You can learn more in our announcement here: http://wufoo.com/2010/06/24/improved-wufoo-integration-with-mailchimps-merge-tag-and-interest-group-features/
Posted February 8th, 2010 by Kevin Hale.