SL MailChimp Subscribe v1.1.2 : Easily add new members to your MailChimp mailing lists

Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU!

I’m running a community website with order 2,000 members and I’ve been looking for a way to improve our newsletter blasts.

We’ve had a really hard time trying to understand how to manage members when members = newsletter subscribers. Opting out of an EE based membership/subscription as Joe Average Citizen appears impossible / not at all transparent. I’ve wondered if it’s even legal given SPAM laws? (Maybe others could share how they handle things?)

How does this Add-on deal with those who opt out on the Chimp side of things? How does it update the EE membership tables to remove that former member?

Hi Thomas,

How does this Add-on deal with those who opt out on the Chimp side of things? How does it update the EE membership tables to remove that former member?

I think there may be some confusion here. Membership of the EE site, and inclusion on the MailChimp mailing list(s) are treated as two entirely separate things; the extension simply provides an easy way to add members to one or more MailChimp mailing lists when they register with your site.

If you wanted to provide unsubscribe links for each of your mailing lists on (for example) a custom member profile page, you could easily do that (the extension even generates the links for you).

However, updating your mailing list preferences via a membership preferences form on your EE site does not update subscriptions to your MailChimp mailing list. This limitation is related to this feature request, so if you’d like to lend your support to it, I might be able to implement that feature in future versions.

Finally, unsubscribing from a mailing list on the MailChimp site does not in any way affect the member’s registration with the EE site, which is as it should be. As you said:

We’ve had a really hard time trying to understand how to manage members when members = newsletter subscribers.

I hope that clarifies things, but if you have any more questions, just let me know.

Cheers, Stephen

Stephen,

Thanks for your quick reply mate.

This is a core “issue” that I’ve struggled with for years in EE. EE doesn’t seem to provide anyway for members to “de-register” which leads to the dastardly “dead-member bloat” disease. Further, in our case/needs, we want no distinction between a member and our mail-list “subscriber” - if someone doesn’t want our newsletters then we want them to no longer be “a member”.

We provide free services for our “members” (and we use EE member controls to police that) and we can reach them with our newsletters. If they don’t want our newsletters then we don’t want to provide them our free services.

You’ve created a great EE add-on link into a promising service - it’s just me that apparently has crazy ideas about how EE “subscription/membership” should/could be.

Hi Thomas,

Hm, sounds like this won’t meet your requirements then, at least not all of them.

In order to handle the unsubscribe side of things, you could create a CRON job that runs some custom code to query the MailChimp API once a day, and deletes any members who have unsubscribed from your mailing lists in the past 24 hours (not quite as simple as it sounds, as I don’t think there’s an API method for that, but should be possible).

Alternatively, you could write a custom extension that checks MailChimp when a person attempts to log-in… if he’s no longer on the MailChimp mailing list, he’s denied access to the site. I fancy there are a lot of “could go wrongs” with the latter option that you’d need to accommodate.

Hope that helps.

Cheers, Stephen

Hello,

I am trying in add this new extension to the area where it says Contact Us on the right form http://www.neblettbeardandarsenault.com/nba/index-mailing-list/ but how do I add the code to add it to the Mailchimp? I am using the Freeform module on the contact form….and want to give the user the option to add themselves to the list when they send a message….I already created the profile field.

thanks

Kevin

Hi Kevin,

I am trying in add this new extension to the area where it says Contact Us on the right form http://www.neblettbeardandarsenault.com/nba/index-mailing-list/ but how do I add the code to add it to the Mailchimp?

SL MailChimp Subscribe is designed to automatically subscribe newly-registered members of your ExpressionEngine website to your MailChimp mailing lists.

It looks like you’re more interested in a standard MailChimp sign-up form. You can watch the relevant MailChimp video tutorial here.

Hope that helps.

Stephen

Stephen,

If a Member doesn’t sign up for the newsletter when they register, how can they subsequently add themselves to the newsletter from their EE Member profile?

Thanks, Euan

Hi Euan,

Apologies for the delay in replying. By way of an answer, permit me to quote myself:

…updating your mailing list preferences via a membership preferences form on your EE site does not update subscriptions to your MailChimp mailing list. This limitation is related to this feature request, so if you’d like to lend your support to it, I might be able to implement that feature in future versions.

I hope that clarifies matters. It’s a very annoying limitation, so if you have a moment please chime in on the Feature Request thread. The sooner EllisLab implement the hook, the sooner I can add the feature.

Cheers, Stephen

Stephen,

No worries.

So at the moment, unless they sign up when they register there is no way for them to add themselves via their profile - it would need to be done via a separate sign up form?

Yes… I added my support to that thread a few months ago 😊

Cheers Euan

So at the moment, unless they sign up when they register there is no way for them to add themselves via their profile - it would need to be done via a separate sign up form?

That’s correct.

Yes… I added my support to that thread a few months ago

Good stuff, thanks Euan.

Cheers, Stephen

Hey Stephen, Thanks for the great work.

I have the extension working on our members registration page but I’m having trouble collecting users birthday and matching it with the mailchimp date field. ref:// registration page

Do you have any recommendations?

Thanks, Chad

Hi Chad,

I have the extension working on our members registration page but I’m having trouble collecting users birthday and matching it with the mailchimp date field.

Hm. The fact that you’re capturing the date of birth in three separate fields means you’ll need to do some pre-processing, and save the data to a separate field (that isn’t displayed on the user registration form), in a format that MailChimp understands.

The simplest solution would be to write an extension that attaches itself to the “member_member_register” (if your site does not use email activation) or “member_register_validate_members” (if your site does use email activation) hook, and give it a higher priority than the SL MailChimp Subscribe extension (anything higher than 10).

Your extension can then combine the Day, Month, and Year field data into a single “date_of_birth” field (in the format YYYY-MM-DD). Link the “date_of_birth” field to your MailChimp merge variable, and that should work just fine.

Hope that helps.

Stephen

SL MailChimp doesn’t seem to play nice with Solspace User v2 module.

Registration via Solspace User module doesn’t seem to trigger adding a user to MailChimp list.

Has anyone had any luck with this combo?

SL MailChimp doesn’t seem to play nice with Solspace User v2 module. Registration via Solspace User module doesn’t seem to trigger adding a user to MailChimp list. Has anyone had any luck with this combo?

Not so good. Was away to add this extension to work with Solspace User’s module. Have you got this to work yet?