How to import Users Insights groups to MailChimp

When communicating with your users you can highly increase your results if you apply segmented marketing tactics and send messages that resonate with different user groups. We have already seen how you can create different user groups based on different user attributes, so today we are going to see how you can use MailChimp to create user groups that reflect your Users Insights groups. We’ll mirror our setup and we’ll see some tips to do these actions in bulk.

The MailChimp groups are a great tool to create a subset of users for focused messages. When creating your MailChimp groups you can set them to be like radio buttons / dropdowns (a user can only be assigned to one group) or as checkboxes (users can be assigned to multiple groups).

Also, often these groups are used in your sign-up forms. But today we’ll discuss how you can import users directly to certain groups, or assign them to different groups. Thus we’ll cover from the first step, which is creating your groups inside MailChimp, to more advanced techniques, like using segments to dynamically filter your users and assign them to different groups.

Our mains topics for today are:

• Exporting your WordPress users with their groups
• Creating your MailChimp groups
• Importing users into the MailChimp groups
• Assigning groups dynamically with segments

So let’s get right into it!

 

Exporting your WordPress users with their groups

First we need to create a user export file, containing the user groups. The way you group your users depends on how you are dividing your user base, but let’s see some examples for that.

You can use the Users Insights smart filters to find the users who match your requirements. For example, if you want to group your users based on their activity, you can use the sessions filter. Then you can add these users to a Users Insights group by using the bulk actions:

Once you have all the groups setup in Users Insights, you can go ahead and export your users. You can further use any of the smart filters to export a custom segment of the users. In this example we are going to use the “User Group is set” filter just to make sure that only users that belong to a group will be exported.

It is very important to mention that the “User Group” field has to be visible when doing the export. In this way, the group info will be available in the export file. Once you have the desired filters and columns visible, just click on the export button to create the user group export:

Creating your MailChimp groups

Before we can import the users with their groups, we need to create the matching groups in MailChimp. In this way, MailChimp will be able to automatically detect these groups and assign them to the imported users. For, example, if we have groups like “active”, “loyal” and “partner”, we’ll need to create groups in MailChimp with the same names. You can do that by clicking on one of your lists, then go to Manage Contacts > Groups and click on the “Create Group” button.

In this section make sure that you select the “Checkbox” option, so you can have users belonging to multiple groups:

 

Then setup the group names – after you are done, you should have something like this:

 

Importing users into the MailChimp groups

To import the users go to “Add Contacts” > “Import Contacts” section. Next, select the CSV import method, since our export file is in a CSV format.

 

Select your file location and click “Next” (it’s in the bottom of your screen).

The next step is mapping the data. You can assign each of your export columns to one of your user fields, or create new ones if you want to. For each of your fields you can select your mapping option (or skip) and save.

The important part here is mapping the User Group field. When you create a group set with MailChimp, it will be available as a new column in the table. In this section we have to select the name of this group column (the name of the group set) in the mapping dropdown.

In this case the group set is called “Groups”.

 

Once you are done with the mapping, just click on the “Next” button and the users will get imported. If everything has gone well with the group mapping, you will see the users imported to the corresponding groups:

 

 

Assigning groups dynamically with segments

For this second method we’ll use the MailChimp segments. But aren’t the MailChimp groups and Segments the same thing? Well, no.

The MailChimp groups can be used when sending a campaign for either splitting your main list into smaller chunks, or to add this data directly in your email’s body.

On the other hand, the segments work very similarly to the Users Insights smart filters. They can be used to dynamically segment your users, but this filtering isn’t persistent.

This approach can be useful if you prefer not to create matching groups in MailChimp, but still use the Users Insights group info to segment your users.

The export part of this approach is similar to the previous example. The only requirement is to have the “User Group” column visible when doing the export:

Now, you just need to import this entire user file under the list Add Contacts  > Import Contacts section. The rest of the process is similar as before. The only difference is that we are going to map the group column to a new “Text” column:

In this way, the groups will be stored in a text field that you can use in your search crireria.

After you have the users imported, go to Manage Contacts > Segments > Create a new Segment. Then you can filter your users by the UI group column, just by using the “contains” filter:

Once you have the segment created, it will act similarly as the groups above. You can send these users to other lists or groups or send them a targeted campaign.

 

Conclusion

Today we looked into the importance of MailChimp groups for splitting your user base. This can help you send segmented campaigns and better connect with your audience. By the end of the day you should be able to export your customers from WordPress, using Users Insights. You should be also able to add them into your MailChimp groups.

We hope you enjoyed this article and see you again next time!