CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi erik - what is it that the client sees as beneficial from using MailChimp v CiviMail?

Not any experience yet, but we are just doing our best to persuade a would-be client to abandon MailChimp integration plans and come totally over to civicrm 

Hi Erik,

In my opinion, the better targeting means they don't know you can now get the result of a search/advanced search/custom search to do the mailing.

One benefit I see on using an external provider like mailchimp/amazon... is that they do handle the config, handle the load and deal with the blacklisting (it's time consuming) and in general might get a better delivery rate (at least better than if you don't configure properly your mail server).

Check on the forum, there's been various discussion about this integration already. Not sure if something has already be done/raised...

X+

I don't think anyone ever got past just asking about this. There is of course this http://drupal.org/project/mailchimp which might be a starting point.

For larger organizations, there can be a distinct advantage to using a third party service, if that service invests effort to remain whitelisted on other servers. Also many other services also provide far more detailed statistics and reporting then CiviMail.

one big drawback of civimail (compared to mailchimp/constant contact/vertical response) is the whole "making a newsletter" / template composition etc is missing

This is content. What to publish and how to layout it is not the job of a CRM, leave it to drupal/joomla.

Xavier's rule: All programs evolve until they they become a CMS.

What is IMO badly missing is to be able to have embedded images (eg. logo) that aren't external, and wysiwyg editors are so unable to generate the moronic html outlook and webmails can handle it is not funny anymore.

Hi,

My personal advice is that the newsletter should be used to highlight the best articles of the previous period. These are supposed to be published on the website powered by the CMS. We do a custom template presentation that does fetch the right information, and generate the right html so you just have to copy/paste, and voila, newsletter done.

For those that send newsletters:

If you are writing the content of the newsletter while sending the newsletter instead of reusing existing content, you are doing it wrong IMHO. If you are using word to write the newsletter and hope to paste it in civimail and that it will work with all clients, you will be disappointed.

Again, I'd suggest to publish first on the site, then use a template/view/whatever is offered by your CMS to generate the content formatted ready to have the html copy/pasted in your civimail, and life is good.

We are doing it with lists of 10000th of contacts, it works, and doesn't take a lot of extra time and you have the content both on the website and on the newsletter

X+

I'm (re-)starting work on the CiviCRM <-> Mailchimp integration today and hope to have it completed within a week or two.  Anyone interested in collaborating on this, please contact me.