MailChimp has become one of the most widely-used email marketing platforms for small and growing businesses. The platform sends billions of emails per month on behalf of its users and has been used by tens of thousands of Shopify merchants.
Though its a widely-used platform, last Friday MailChimp announced that it was shutting down its integration with Shopify, much to the dismay of merchants. Citing concerns over recent changes at Shopify, MailChimp claimed "negatively impact our business and put our customers at risk."
A lot of rumors and misinformation have swirled around the ecommerce community about the impact that this would have on Shopify-based businesses that use MailChimp. Here are options that those users have:
- Integrate your Shopify data with MailChimp using ShopSync, a free-to-use Shopify app that allows you to sync your data with MailChimp as normal.
- Import your data manually (the worst solution).
- Switch to another email marketing tool, like Klaviyo (more information below).
While MailChimp is a good tool to get more simple ecommerce tasks done, like manage a list and send basic abandoned cart emails, even prior to the announcement it has never made all of the same Shopify data available to its users that other platforms do. However, it's free up to the first 2,000 subscribers, so it's always a great solution for businesses that are first starting out.
For businesses that are both growing and more mature, the MailChimp and Shopify break up is a good time to consider a switch. Klaviyo has become a more widely-used platform for Shopify-based businesses. From a cost-perspective, it's more expensive than MailChimp, but still on the low-end relative to other ESP's (email service providers). Klaviyo has powerful segmentation and automation tools and pulls in data that MailChimp does not--for example, Collections, Product ID's & SKU's, Variants and more accurate purchase data.
Overall, last week's MailChimp news came as a bit of a shock, but for businesses that are a right fit for the platform, ShopSync is a relatively easy setup. For others, it may be time to move on. As it turns out, prior to its split with Shopify, MailChimp quietly acquired startup ecommerce provider LemonStand--this is a bit more telling as to why they ended their partnership with Shopify.
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If you have a Shopify store and use MailChimp, but don't know what to do following this announcement, contact Ben Zettler to talk about your options and create a plan to ensure that you're business continues to run smoothly following the closure of the MailChimp <> Shopify integration.
