So I know that Patreon can integrate with Mailchimp in that, via Zapier, you can maintain an accurate Mailchimp list of only current Patrons with no manual maintenance required, which is great. However, I email out reward links every month and I send different things to different tiers, so this feature is useless to me and I have to maintain my lists manually. I would love to streamline that process, but I’m curious if any of you do anything similar and if you have any suggestions on how to better manage this. Here are my ideas so far:
Send one email and link to Patreon posts in the email. This would mean that lower tier Patrons receive an email that links them to some posts that they then may not be able to access, depending on their pledge tier. (Which I guess is fine? They know their tier… and maybe it would encourage them to upgrade?) The downside here is that people would have to click twice to access some of these rewards (e.g., click from the email to Patreon, then from Patreon to the reward) which is a bit of a pain.
Allow Zapier to maintain the complete list, but manually segment the list. I haven’t done much with list segmentation yet, so I’m not 100% sure how this would work, but it seems reasonable that segmenting the list manually would be easier than creating separate lists, right? And my assumption would be that the Zapier integration would at the very least ensure that ex-Patrons are removed from the list, so I don’t accidentally send rewards to people who are no longer paying.
Any thoughts? I sink a lot of time into deleting and reuploading lists every month, and it’s something I’d really love to just not have to worry about.
Option 2 is definitely possible. I can help walk through the steps for setting up Zapier to keep track of which tier a patron is on, so that it’s easy to segment the lists. Essentially, you need to add a custom text “list field” in Mailchimp, and then in Zapier make sure that it populates that field with “Amount Dollars”. You’ll likely need to include 2 different Zaps (one for adding them to the list, and another for removing them from the list)… I’ve built these before and can help you set it up if you run into trouble. I agree that deleting and re-uploading lists every month is not fun… let’s automate that!
Ahhh, thank you, that may actually be enough information for me to figure it out myself — but I’ll let you know if I get stuck on anything. I appreciate it!!
Were you able to figure this out? Curious how it worked out for you, especially since MailChimp just replaced segments with tags. I may want to do this for myself in the coming months.
I set mine up using groups (it appears that Zapier can only use groups, not segments or tags) and while I’m not 100% sure it’s working (since I haven’t gained a pledge yet since setting it up), it all looks functional! I did have to use 4/5 of my free zaps to do it, though — one to place new Patrons onto the list, one to remove deleted ones, one to update with pledge amount changes, and one to add Patrons to another group if they have a payment declined.
That does sound a bit convoluted but I’m excited to hear if it works! Building a Mailchimp app that does this directly would certainly help make this easier for others to copy.
WELL, bad news, unfortunately. I’ve had a few new Patrons join since I set up these zaps and I’m afraid I’m running into some problems I can’t easily diagnose. When Zapier pulls in data on new Patrons, all of the “amount” related fields (amount_cents, amount_dollars, lifetime_support_dollars, and lifetime_support_cents) just say “0” regardless of their actual pledge amount. Name and email information are pulling in fine, so I’m not sure what the problem is. That prevents Mailchimp from accurately categorizing them into the tier-based groups I set up… and each has to be corrected manually, which completely defeats the purpose. Any advice? Here’s an example.
@ginnydi can you send me a screenshot of your zap? I want to make sure I am de-bugging the right thing here. You can private message them to me here if that works.
