GoSignMeUp Admin Help GuideEmailsE-mail A Custom ListHow To Use Mail Chimp For Email Blasts

How To Use Mail Chimp For Email Blasts

When you use your GoSignMeUp system to send out large email blasts you risk having your site blacklisted.  The rules of the game have changed and internet providers more and more are being very strict about sites that send out a lot of email.  In order to reduce the chances of valuable course-registration emails being blocked, it is a good idea to use a third-party service such as Mail Chimp to handle larger promotional email campaigns.  GoSignMeUp can easily pull the data out of your system for just such a purpose.  Here is how !

 

Mail Chimp

You will need an account with Mail Chimp.  MailChimp is an email marketing service provider, founded in 2001. It has 7 million users that collectively send over 10 billion emails through the service each month.  It is the service GoSignMeUp uses to do handle of our bulk email.  Mail Chimp is a great way to avoid getting your site blacklisted as they are experts at bulk-email delivery and as a third-party use a separate internet provider and address than your GoSignMeUp installation.  Problem with sending bulk emails directly from GoSignMeUp is that it can flag your web site's domain (i.e. yoursite.gosignmeup.com) as a spammer and get it black listed!  It is a far better practice to limit your GoSignMeUp site to the automated course confirmation emails and such and use an external site to handle promotional emails.  

http://mailchimp.com/

Pull Your Data

From the GoSignMeUp Admin menu, under Modules, you will find the Imports/Exports menu (1).  From here click the  Ad-Hoc Reporting/Export (2).

Ad-Hoc Reporting/Export

The Ad-Hoc Reporting/Export tool is one of the most powerful features of your GoSignMeUp installation.  Here you can access the enormous amount of data stored in your system for use in other applications.  Pulling names and email addresses for bulk email campaign on Mail Chimp is just such a use!  Its easy to get what you need.  You get all of the data or limit your results with many fitlers, including date range, Course, or many of your organizations classification fields.  If you want the students in a specific course, type the first few letters of the course and it should populate the box beneath.  Simply click on the course name to pull only students registered in that course.  For this example we will assume you want everyone's email addresses for a Mail Chimp blast, so scroll down to the Fields To Choose From: box.  Mail Chimp only needs FIRST, LAST and EMAIL, so hold down the Ctrl key and click those fields to select them, then click Add-->  

Process Request

Put your email in to the E-Mail Address: field (1) and choose the E-mail the file?  (2) option then press the  Process Request button (3).  

You also can save this as a template if you want for future data pulls.  Simply put a name in the Save Report Template: and click the Save Template button.

CSV File

The system will email you the CSV file you need.  Save it to your local hard drive.

CSV = Excel file

Open the CSV file in Microsoft Excel, so you can see how the data parses out.  The Ad-Hoc Reporting/Export tool is a great way to get data out of your GoSignMeUp system for further manipulation. Select and delete the first row of column labels.  Now Save As | Other Formats | CSV file for import in to Mail Chimp.

If you don't have Excel or have a specific data-pull need, feel free to contact GoSignMeUp technical support for assistance!

Creating your list in Mail Chimp

In Mail Chimp, select Lists, then Create List.  Fill out the details for use in your email campaign and click Save.

Import your CSV file

Under the Add Subscribers tab, click Import Subscribers.   Choose the CSV or tab-delimited text file option and click Next (bottom right corner.)  Browse your local machine for the file and select it, then click Next again.

Define the Fields

For each column you need to let Mail Chimp know what the data is.  So from the drop down, choose the corresponding field title.  It should go as First name, Last name and Email.   Once you have assigned each column, click Next.  On the next screen make sure the imported subscribers are Subscribed, and click Import.  That's it!

Use your list

Now in Mail Chimp you have a list of email addresses from your GoSignMeUp data!  Its easy!  Now when you create a new email Campaign in Mail Chimp you can use this list and not worry about spam filters!