Announcing the User Sync feature
Moments ago, we released an update for our Premium add-on which adds a new feature called User Sync. It allows you to keep your WordPress user fields in sync with subscriber fields on a given Mailchimp list.
You may be familiar with this feature from our discontinued Mailchimp User Sync plugin, which we used to offer for free on WordPress.org.
It was created before GDPR coming into effect and before Mailchimp announcing their latest API, so it had to go into a weird limbo to support both of these changes. That introduced some technical debt which proved impossible to get rid of without breaking backwards compatibility for our users.
The main culprits were the subscribe and unsubscribe logic and the highly specialized use cases that the plugin was used for.
That is why we are taking a different approach this time:
- User Sync is now a premium feature, allowing us to support more specialized use cases.
- User Sync no longer subscribes or unsubscribes users, greatly simplifying much of the codebase.
What can User Sync be used for?
You can use User Sync to make sure your subscriber fields in Mailchimp always matches the data in your WordPress user base.
Whenever someone updates their email address on your WordPress site, you most likely want to have that change reflected in Mailchimp as well. That is where User Sync comes in.
Since you can map additional user fields to list fields in Mailchimp, you can extend this to include custom user fields. For example: address details coming from WooCommerce, phone numbers, interest groups based on the user role or subscription status, etc. Anything that is stored in the user meta table can be sent to Mailchimp.
Here’s an example of what setting this up looks like:
How do I subscribe my users?
We recommend using one of our sign-up integrations for taking care of the subscribe logic. One example is using our registration form integration to subscribe each new user to a selected Mailchimp list, implicitly or by asking them.
If you want to subscribe existing WordPress users to a Mailchimp list, we recommend exporting your WordPress users to CSV and then importing them into Mailchimp. Make sure you have the necessary permissions before doing this though.
We’ll soon be releasing another update in which we generate the export file containing the mapped fields from your user sync settings.
If you have any feedback or suggestions for User Sync or another thing you think we should know, don’t hesitate to talk with us.