A long time ago, I came very close to wrecking my car’s engine.

It was a brand new car and as pulled in to fill up the tank, I naturally went to the diesel pump, as my previous car was a diesel.  Of course, my new car had a petrol engine and just before I depressed the pump handle, I realised I was about to make a big mistake.

Fortunately, I managed to stop myself before I did something wrong (I know a few friends who haven’t been so lucky), but whenever I think of Mailchimp’s database and why you really need to understand how it fits together, my mind goes back to that incident with my car.

Just like a car, you need to make sure you put the right thing in the right place, otherwise you’re likely to end up with a few issues, some of them extremely painful.

You wouldn’t put water in a tyre, oil in the gas tank and petrol into the windscreen wiper bottle, and Mailchimp’s no different. You need to make sure you’re putting the right information in the right place in Mailchimp.

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Mailchimp’s Database

Now I know that it’s likely that some of you may be zoning out already with all this talk about Mailchimp’s database and how to manage and structure data, but I assure you, it’s something you need to understand.

Especially if you’re going to get Mailchimp work really effectively for you.

So what do you need to know to make the most of Mailchimp?

The Building Blocks of Mailchimp

When it comes down to it, there are just 6 terms you need to understand when it comes to the Mailchimp database:

• Audiences
• Records
• Fields
• Segments
• Groups
• Tags

If you can get your head around these 6 terms it will help you understand how to store the data that you have collected and where to put it to use it effectively, and you’ll be well on your way to success with Mailchimp.

So let’s dig into each to give you the low down…

Audiences – Your List

Up until 2018, Audiences were called lists and they are pretty much the fundamental building block of Mailchimp.

Your audience is your list, your database, the place where all your data is stored.

People ‘subscribe’ and ‘unsubscribe’ from your audience and you get charged (if you pay for Mailchimp) based on the total number of contacts you have in all of the audiences in your Mailchimp account.

Think of your audience as a spreadsheet where all the data is stored.

When you sign up for Mailchimp, it’ll create your first audience (and if you’re on a free account, you only get one!).

…and please, please, please, try and avoid having more than one audience in your Mailchimp account… You’ll potentially face lots of issues if you try and have more than one (as covered in this article).

One thing about audiences you need to know is that you cannot have a specific email address in an audience more than once, but you can have the same email address in more than one audience.

For example, if you have a family where all the people in the family use the same email address – it’ll only appear once in your database, so you can’t then use it to communicate to different people in that family.

…and if you decide to have multiple audiences, things can get confusing as the same email address can appear in multiple audiences – which is not ideal, especially if they unsubscribe from one audience… (again, try and have one audience only)

Records – The people in your audience

A record is a collection of information about an individual in your audience.  There are different types of information, such as fields, tags or groups, (more on those later), but it’s all connected to one single email address.

If you visualise a spreadsheet, each record is a horizontal row and then each vertical column has information about that records.

Essentially, a record is a ‘contact’ in your database, in other words, it’s all related to the email address.

Fields – the pots of information you store about a person

Fields are pots that you store specific information directly related to an individual record – in the spreadsheet example, these are vertical columns.

Fields are where you store the key information an individual, such as their email address (which is known as the ‘key’ field), their name, company or any other specific information about them.

Fields can be alphanumeric, just numeric (e.g. if you have a unique reference number your business uses to identify people), a date, or even could a specific type in a list.

I usually try and think of fields as specific & unique about an individual – such as their name, date of birth, company, address, phone, etc.

Mailchimp gives you the chance to create up to 60 fields so you’ve got lots of options, but my recommendation is only create fields that you actually need.

I’ve seen many databases which have had loads of irrelevant and useless information inputted, and never actually used!

Fields can be used in Mailchimp as ‘merge tags’ which means that within an email you can substitute that field in for each person who gets that email, so you can make each email individual and personal.

Groups – your “user” preferences

Although I cover groups (and tags) a bit more extensively here, as they are extremely useful, so you need to have some initial understanding of where they fit in to Mailchimp’s database hierarchy.

Groups were developed a long time ago as a way of “classifying” records with common interests… and form the foundation of many Mailchimp audiences out there – allowing businesses to target different records based on the ‘group’ that they are in.

Groups are created in an audience, and you have a main group category title and then individual groups within that group category.

So you could have a group category of “interests” and a list of individual groups within that category like “golf”, “tennis”, “football”.

The best way to think of groups is as “user preferences“, as, unlike tags, you can have groups visible in the standard forms you can create within Mailchimp (which you can’t with tags).

So if you want someone to be able to update some of their information, then have that information as a group.

Not many people seem to use groups nowadays, but their still relevant, especially when it comes to any user preferences you want people to update (e.g. interests, frequency of emails, etc.)

You can still hide groups from forms if you want, so don’t feel you have to jump on the tags bandwagon – but like fields, there is a maximum limit of groups you can have in one audience (tags have no such limits).

Tags –  a tracking powerhouse

Again, tags are covered in more detail in this separate article as they are, in our minds, very important in making Mailchimp work smoothly, but I’ll cover them here as well.

Tags were launched in late 2018 and the reason for their existence (if you really want to know) is that Groups have some “technical” limitations which make them a bit clunky and inflexible… not from the user point of view, but rather from Mailchimp’s admin point of view.  As such, tags were developed as “the new groups.” (Don’t worry if you use groups, Mailchimp aren’t going to throw them away)

You can assign tags manually to individual contacts, add them to contacts when you import them or automatically via external tools like forms and CRM systems.

There are a few fundamental difference between tags and groups:

• Groups can be displayed on forms created within Mailchimp, tags can’t.
• Groups have a limitation in how many you can create, tags don’t.
• Groups have a hierarchy where as tags don’t.

The key advantage that tags have over groups is that there’s no limit to how many you create AND they are hidden from users – which makes them perfect to track activity in the background without your contacts knowing how they are tagged (e.g. do you really want a prospect to know they’re a cold or a hot prospect? Probably not!) – this is why we tend to refer to tags as “tracking tags“.

The downside is that tags have no structure, so you have to develop a naming convention to give you that structure (e.g. when I use a tag to track the form which someone has completed to get into my audience, I use a convention of EP: WF Home Page – which breaks down as EP (Entry Point), WF (Web Form) and then the specific form they used).

Naming conventions are really important if you’re using lots of tags in your set up.

Segments – Diving deep into your data

Chances are you’re probably not going to get to deep into Segments, but they are something worth knowing about.

In Mailchimp, segments are ‘snapshots’ of records in the database that have something in common – and you decide what that is.

Unlike tags and groups, Segments are a way of “querying” the database… for example, you can create a segment of “who opened my last email?”, or “who joined my audience in the last 30 days?”, or even “who’s got a gmail address?”

You can even use segments to identify people who have\haven’t taken action in your emails… e.g. “who opened this specific email?”… or even “who clicked in this email?”.

…and the big thing is you can have up to 5 factors accounting for who’s in the segment – e.g. “who was sent this email AND is tagged as Customer”.

On the face of it, segments sound really useful… and they are quite powerful in reality, it’s just that most of the time you’re likely to be ‘segmenting’ your audience based on groups or tags – which are a bit like ‘more permanent’ segments.

…but one of the great things about segments is you can create them, and then refresh them in the future – which is great if you’re sending a campaign to a segment of your audience and then you want to do it again – you just refresh the segment and then when you send the campaign it sends it to anyone who’s in the segment at the point of sending.

A typical segment could be someone who’s tagged as “Customer” but who is has not purchased a specific product. You can create this segment, send them a campaign and then in a few months time replicate the campaign and send it to the same segment – it would be updated at the send of the second email… so anyone who purchased the product after the first campaign wouldn’t get the second email… because they’d no longer be in the segment!

Wrapping Up

If you’ve got to this point, well done!

Understanding the database structure in Mailchimp is not the most ‘riveting’ of reads, but if you’re struggling with the various terms, or how you should ‘classify’ your data in Mailchimp, then hopefully this has given you some structure.

Knowing the difference between a record, a field, a tag, etc. will ensure you build your database effectively and future proof it as you look to capture more information on your audience.

…and ensure you don’t end up putting the wrong fuel in your Mailchimp database! 

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P.S.

To get to grips with your database and Mailchimp there are a couple of other articles you really need to read if you haven’t already:

• Audiences – why you should only have one
• Segmenting – the best way to segment your database

Hopefully, along with this article, you’ll get a solid foundation when it comes to Mailchimp’s way of managing data.