How To Deliver Unique Codes in a Mailchimp Customer Journey Using Tags

Coupon Carrier is a promotional tool to help you gain email subscribers or foot traffic by delivering unique time-sensitive discounts and coupons to your email subscribers — Connects directly to your favorite email service provider.

Using Mailchimp’s Customer Journey feature, you can automate sending emails in many ways, for example, when a subscriber:

Suppose you want to deliver unique codes from one of your code lists to a subscriber in a customer journey. In that case, you can use tags to trigger Coupon Carrier to apply a code to the subscriber and then let the journey continue to send out an email with the code included using a merge tag.

Here’s a quick overview of how it works:

  1. Create a Code Email configuration in Coupon Carrier that monitors your email list and applies a unique code to a merge field when someone receives a tag (ex: “Apply Code”).
  2. Create a customer journey in Mailchimp and specify how it should start by adding a starting point (birthday, cart abandonment, tag added, etc.)
  3. Add an action to apply a tag (ex: “Apply Code”) to the subscriber. This isn’t needed if the starting point is “Tag added” because the tag has already been added.
  4. Add an action to wait/delay a short period to give Coupon Carrier some time to see that the subscriber has received a tag and then apply a code. We’ll go through two ways to do this later in this article.
  5. Send out an email using the Send email action and include the code in the email using a merge tag.

Create a Code Email Configuration in Coupon Carrier

1
If you already have a list of unique codes that you want to distribute to your subscribers, you can Import your codes to a code list. If you’re using an e-commerce platform that we support, you can choose to have your codes automatically generated. In this example, we’ll create a new code list and add a few unique codes:
2
On the main Configurations tab, create a new Code Email configuration and connect it to your Mailchimp account:
3
In this case, we’d like to trigger this configuration when someone receives a tag. You can select an existing tag or create a new one in Mailchimp. In this case, we’re going to choose the existing tag named “Add Code”:
4
We want to let Mailchimp send out the email, so we’ll choose Mailchimp as the sender. To display the code inside the email, we first need to add the code to a custom merge field. Create a new field called Coupon. Next, enable the option to add a Mailchimp event once the code has been added. In this case, we’ll name it “code_added”. Finally, we'll keep the option to only store the code in the selected list field:
5
In the code source step, we can choose which Code list you want to use as the source for your codes. Here we’ll choose the one that we created in the first step.
6
We can now save the configuration, activate it so that it monitors our Mailchimp list for subscribers that are tagged, and then proceed to create our customer journey in Mailchimp.

Create a Customer Journey in Mailchimp

1
Create a new Customer Journey in Mailchimp by going to Automations > Create > Customer Journey. Select your email list and starting point for your automation based on your needs. In this case, we’re going to choose “Tag Added” as the starting point because we want to send out a unique code when someone is tagged with the tag “Add Code”.
2
(Optional) In this example, we’re starting the journey when a tag is added, which means that we don’t need to apply the tag again. But in case you’re using a starting point other than “Tag added”, you’ll need to add an action to apply the tag (“Add Code”) that our Coupon Carrier configuration is monitoring. Here’s how you would do that: 
3
Coupon Carrier will now see that the tag has been added to the subscriber and apply the code to the selected merge field (“Coupon”). However, Coupon Carrier will check the tags every 5 minutes, so we need to make sure that the code has been added before we continue the journey and send out the email.

There are two ways to do this. Either add a Delay action and set it to the minimum value, which currently is 1 hour in a journey. This will give Coupon Carrier enough time to apply the code. Another option is to add a Wait action and tell it to wait until the event named “code_added” occurs. This is the event that we configured Coupon Carrier to add to the subscriber once the code is applied. The benefit of using this is that the journey won’t wait too long to continue and not continue if there is an error adding the code. In this case, we’ll add the Wait action and wait for the event to occur: 
4
The final step is to add the Send email action and edit the email to include the unique code that’s now been added to the subscriber. To do this, we’ll add the merge tag (“Coupon”) in the email: 
5
We’re now ready to start the automation and test it by adding a subscriber and applying the “Add Code” tag to them. Mailchimp journeys take a while to process, so it can take 5-10 min before the email arrives. If you're testing using cart abandonment as a starting point, be aware that they trigger 6 hours after a cart abandons in the store.    

Additional configuration for repeating journeys (birthday, cart abandonment, etc.)

Some journeys where the starting point is a birthday or e-commerce (cart abandonment, product purchased) are often restarted when the starting point triggers again. In the case of birthdays, they are always repeated each year. To allow codes to be delivered multiple times to the same recipient, you need to make a few changes:

1
Update your Coupon Carrier configuration to allow multiple codes to be delivered to the same recipient. If this isn’t enabled, Coupon Carrier will skip the request for a code if the recipient has already received one earlier:
2
Update your Mailchimp journey to allow it to restart each time it’s triggered. And we also need to make sure that we’re removing the tag that we added (“Add Code”) after the email has been sent so that it can be added the next time again:

Still need help? Contact Us Contact Us

Related Articles