Mailchimp: How to Merge Audiences

Magico and AB Commerce Retailers are the Owners of their own customer data and are therefore responsible for it’s management for marketing purposes.  Magico can give you guidance, but as data owners, we advise that Retailers should be fully cognisant of the Customer Data on their site and how it is stored and used. 

Merging two email lists (or 'Audiences' in Mailchimp):

• Our recommendation is that you  use ABC_WebsiteSubscribers as the primary Audience in Mailchimp as this is the Audience that’s synced to abcommerce with a daily data feed.
• If you are to import any data outside of this core Audience, we recommend that you export old audiences, clean them for unsubscribes & check if the email addresses are already in your main, master list (ABC_WebsiteSubscribers)

• In order to do this, the steps are as follows:
• Export any Audiences (lists) that are not ABC_WebsiteSubscribers – e.g MagiSHOP
• Mailchimp > Audiences
• Click View Contacts top right
• Click Export Audience
• This will give you the option on the right to Export as CSV. Click this button
• Your list will come out in a zip file of three excel files – Cleaned, Subscribed and Unsubscribed
• You want to take your Subscribed file & save it on your desktop as a csv file named something like Subscribers to Upload

Mailchimp will only unsubscribe you from the Audience file you are in – so if you are combining lists, you need to make sure the person has not unsubscribed on either list.

• So you need to go back to Audiences
• Select ABC_WebsiteSubscribers
• Use the steps above to export this audience as well.
• From the ABC_WebsiteSubscribers zip file open the Unsubscribed file
• Check this list and see if any of these unsubscribed people are in your MagiShop Subscribers to Upload file.  If they are, then you need to remove them from that file & click save.

Next you need to decide if you want to use this old data to update the new audience, or just overwrite it. Our guidance on this is that your new abcommerce data will have more recent purchase information, but your older file might have other data you want to keep – e.g. birthday. However, this is for you to decide as this is your data.

• Go back to the ABC_WebsiteSubscribers zip file and open the Subscribed file
• Check this list and see if any of these Subscribed people are in your Subscribers to Upload file. You will probably need to use the excel Vlookup function if there are a lot of rows of email addresses.
• Of the people who are on both lists, you need to decide if there is valuable data in the MagiShop Subscribers file you want to bring over in the upload process (e.g. birthday) and if there isn’t, then you can just remove them from MagiShop Subscribers to Upload file as they are already in the ABC_WebsiteSubscribers Audience

 When you’re happy your upload list is clean of Unsubscribes and old data, then you  need to upload this cleaned list:

• Go back to Audiences
• At the top right Manage Audience dropdown, select Import Contacts
• Click Continue to upload
• Browse files and select your Subscribers to Upload file from the desktop
• Continue to Organize
• Select an audience: ABC_WebsiteSubscribers
• Select a status: Subscribed
• Update any existing contacts
• Tag Your Contacts – suggest you tag these Legacy Data or MagiShop
• Continue to match
• Check the columns
• Finalize import
• Complete Import

If this is not something you wish to take on, please email helpdesk@magico.com and Magico can look at supporting this work with paid consultancy hours.