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:
- Has a birthday (additional configuration recommended)
- Purchases a product or abandons a cart (additional configuration recommended)
- Receives a tag
- Responds to a survey
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.
In this article, we will going to send out a unique code to a subscriber one day after they sign up.
Here’s a quick overview of how it works:
- 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”).
- Create a new or edit an existing Mailchimp Journey and add an action to apply a tag (ex: “Apply Code”) to the subscriber.
- Add an action to wait a short period to give Coupon Carrier some time to see that the subscriber has received a tag and then apply a code.
- 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
On the main Configurations tab, create a new Code Email configuration and connect it to your Mailchimp account:
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”:
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:
In the Code Source step, we must choose where the unique codes should come from. You can import your own codes into a code list or use an autogenerated code list (for example, Shopify, Woocommerce, Stripe). In this example, we'll create a new manual code list and add a few sample codes.
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
Create a new or edit an existing Mailchimp Journey. In this example, our starting point is "Signs up for Email" which triggers when someone is added to a list. To tell Coupon Carrier to apply a code to the subscriber, we need to apply a tag. This is the same tag name that we configured Coupon Carrier to monitor in the previous section.
In our case, we want to send out a unique code one day after they've signed up. So we will add the Tag/Untag action right after our "1 day delay" step.
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 ensure that the code has been added before we continue the journey and send out the email.
In the previous section, in Coupon Carrier, we specified that the event "code_added" should be added to the subscriber once the code is successfully added. So we can use this to add a Wait for trigger action and tell the journey to wait until the event named “code_added” occurs.
The final step is to add/edit the email to include the merge tag where the unique code was stored. Click the send email action and open the email designer. When editing the email content, you can use the Merge Tags dropdown in the menu to insert the tag for your coupon field. In our case, the field is named Coupon.
- We’re now ready to start the automation and test it. 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 several hours after a cart is abandoned 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:
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:
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:
