Intuit, the owner of QuickBooks, acquired Mailchimp in 2021. Since then, the firm encouraged its Proadvisors to boost their knowledge of the integration between the two platforms. I spent some time learning but have not found it so effective for my businesses, my clients, or associated nonprofits outside of periodic newspaper use. (That is another issue outside of the scope of this post).
This past week I faced another issue and invested more time in learning about the tools and mechanics of integration.
Unopened emails – An issue that I am dealing with right now is a nonprofit social group that uses QuickBooks for invoicing and MailChimp for invitations to social events. Some members have complained that they receive the invoice and not the invitations to social events. Obviously that causes dissatisfaction among those paying members who are not invited to social events. In the past, this was blamed on email spam filtering, especially Gmail filtering, or the member’s inability to effectively handle their own email accounts, or other technical issues outside of the sending social group’s control. The social group lost at least two dues-paying members (a combined $1200+ annual revenue) who complained about this issue without reaching satisfaction.
Lack of two-way update integration: Now, after spending some additional time learning about the integration of QuickBooks and Mailchimp, I see that it is possible and likely that the email address used by MailChimp for invitations is different than the list used to send invoices. This might be connected to a lower level of service plan subscription. The difference might stem from a lack of two-way integration between the lists, or some other reason. That is all the progress I have so far. I want to investigate two-way integration of email address changes and possible removal of second email addresses in the system.
Mailchimp is able to report when a series of emails have not been opened. In the case of an active social group, this may be an indicator of an address where delivery to the mailbox is successful but it is not seen by the recipient.
I will likely propose a manual review of recipients with a history of unopened emails and suggest other method of contact (phone call) to ask if their is a better way to communicate. Perhaps manual removal of old email addresses or addition of an email that forwards to a text message account might be useful.
Many of my business and personal prefer group text communications for informal communications. While some third-party applications integrate with Mailchimp, I am not familiar with them. One I tried a few years ago was frustrating and I dropped it.
Mailchimp’s training materials say that most small business operators see marketing as a way to meet goals of building the business and retain customers. Yet few see training in marketing as a way to achieve these goals. Going forward, I will likely offer the option of Mailchimp setup and integration when I do QuickBooks setup work. Even if small business and nonprofits only use the free version for occasional newsletters, I think it is a good start.