This article goes over integrating Mailchimp with your Teachable school.
Overview
Mailchimp is an email marketing tool that allows you to build and manage large email lists. Teachable already includes an email client that allows you to send one-time emails to your entire group of students or a smaller, targeted subset, but you may want to use Mailchimp to:
- Set up automatic emails
- Make sure students who sign up for your school are added to your email list
- Monitor and track email performance
- And more
Integrate Mailchimp with your school
- Log in to your Teachable school and select Settings at the bottom of the admin sidebar.
- Click Integrations from the submenu.
- Scroll down and find Mailchimp in the list of integrations. Click the checkbox to enable Mailchimp in your Teachable school.
- Once you’ve enabled Mailchimp, you’ll see two empty text fields asking for a Mailchimp API Key and a Mailchimp Audience ID. To find those, open up a new window and log in to your Mailchimp account.
- Click your profile icon in the bottom left corner of your Mailchimp dashboard.
- Select Account from the pop-up menu.
- Click Extras.
- Choose API keys from the dropdown list.
- Scroll down to the Your API Keys section and click Create a Key.
- The page will reload. Scroll down and copy the API key that appears under the Your API keys heading.
- Go back to your Teachable school and paste the API key into the Mailchimp API Key text field.
- To find your Mailchimp List ID, travel back to your Mailchimp dashboard and click Audience from the left navigation bar.
- Click Manage Audience from the right-side of the page. Then, click Settings from the drop-down menu.
- Scroll down and copy the Unique id at the bottom of the page.
- Return to your Teachable window and paste the ID into the MailChimp List ID text field.
- Click the Save button in the upper right corner.
Once the integration has been setup, every student who registers for your Teachable school will also be added to your Mailchimp. However, if a student opts out of your marketing emails upon registration, they will not be added to your Mailchimp list.
Troubleshooting
If users are not being sent to your Mailchimp list, please review the following troubleshooting steps.
Edit your audience field settings
When a user signs up for a Teachable account, they enter their name as one field. In other words, Teachable does not require separate first and last name fields. Therefore, you should check your Mailchimp settings to ensure you are not requiring separate first and last name fields.
- From your Mailchimp Audience Dashboard, click the Manage Audience dropdown menu. Then, select Settings.
- Select Audience fields and *|MERGE|* tags.
- Uncheck any Required or Visible boxes for First Name and Last Name values. Click Save Changes at the bottom of the page.
Check your student opt-in status
When a student signs up for an account in your school, they have the option to opt-in to receiving instructional and promotional emails.
If a student does not opt-in to receive these emails, they will not be passed to your Mailchimp list.
You can see which students have opted in/out of receiving emails from your school by going to Users > Students and checking the Email Opt Out column. "Yes" means that they have opted out and will not receive emails. "No" means they have opted in and will receive emails.