SparkLoop’s easy 2-click integration lets you connect SparkLoop to your Mailchimp account within seconds, no developer or complicated Zapier hacks required!

This is a first and necessary step in setting up your campaign.

SparkLoop needs to access your email list in order to generate unique referral links and referral codes for each individual subscriber, thus ensuring they’re tracked and rewarded properly for referrals.

Don’t worry, however. This is an entirely seamless process and once you’ve selected your ESP and your list (two clicks!), your job is done.

When you sign up for SparkLoop, you will be asked to select your ESP.

From here, choose your ESP and follow the steps to import your list.

Once you’ve selected your ESP and chosen your list, you'll need to wait for your list to finish importing.

How long will the import take?

It’s hard to say, but basically, it comes down to the size of your list.

For small lists of up to 50,000 subscribers, it’s unlikely to take more than half an hour, but if you’ve got a million subscribers on your list, then a couple of days (or more) wouldn’t be out of the question.

If it’s been more than 24 hours and your list hasn’t yet finished importing, feel free to contact us on the status. You can do so here.

After you create a campaign in SparkLoop and import your list, a bunch of custom fields are automatically created in your Mailchimp account.

These include:

Before launching, we need to ensure that all of your newsletter subscribers have had their referral links generated and stored in the RH_REFLINK custom field in your ESP.

You can do this by filtering or segmenting your subscribers in your ESP to only show subscribers who have an RH_REFLINK custom field with no value (also sometimes called blank or empty).

If everything is set up correctly, there should be at most 1-2 subscribers with an empty RH_REFLINK field.

If your subscribers haven’t synced, check out this guide for the reasons why they haven’t, and what you can do about it.

SparkLoop syncs with your ESP, which means that any new subscribes and unsubscribes are updated in SparkLoop automatically.

However, deleted and unsubscribed subscribers will continue to show up in SparkLoop.

Unsubscribed contacts don’t count towards pricing, but they’ll still be inside of SparkLoop to preserve historical data and for anti-fraud protection.

Once your Mailchimp integration is complete and you've set up your referral program, you'll want to make sure your subscribers know about your ambassador program and engage with it. Keeping subscribers engaged can be the difference between a referral program that’s successful and one that isn’t.

Luckily, you only need to set up a few automated emails to achieve this goal.

(Here’s a rundown of the emails we recommend sending and why.)

As your subscribers refer their friends and win rewards, it's important that you notify them via email.

Luckily, you can set these emails up using MailChimp automations in a few minutes.

Step 1: Log in to your MailChimp account.

Step 2: Go to the Campaigns page and click on the Create campaign button.

Step 3: In the pop up, choose Email then switch to Automated and click on the Custom button.

Step 4: Give the automation a name, select the right audience and click on Begin.

Step 5: Click on the Edit link to edit the trigger of this automation.

Step 6: Click on Change trigger.

Step 7: Under Audience management choose Changes in a subscriber’s audience field.

Step 8: In the Delay section, you can specify the delay between the moment a subscriber wins a reward and the moment the email is sent (you can set this to "immediately").

The Settings section is the important one. From the dropdown, select the RH_TOTREF and set the value to the number of referrals needed to win a reward.

For example, if you want to send this email when a subscriber wins a reward that requires 5 referrals, set the value to 5. Remember to save the changes by clicking on the Update trigger button.

Here's what's happening: We are setting up an automation that is triggered when the custom field RH_TOTREF of a subscriber (which stores the number of referrals) changes to a specific number (e.g: 5).

SparkLoop automatically updates the RH_TOTREF value every time a subscriber gets a new referral.

Step 9: Now it's time to design the email. Make sure to congratulate the subscriber for winning the reward and add any information they need to redeem it.

Step 10: Done. Review and enable the automation.

SparkLoop makes it easy for you to segment your subscribers and send them targeted messages, for example:

You can set up these segments very easily using SparkLoop-generated custom fields, in particular: RH_ISREF and RH_TOTREF.

In this example, we are going to create a segment of subscribers who have 3 or more referrals, but the same process can be used to create any custom segment.

Step 1: Go to your MailChimp's dashboard > Audience, choose your audience and click on View contacts. Click on New Segment.

Step 2: Here you can decide which criteria to use to create your segment. For our example, we are going to choose RH_TOTREF is greater than 3.

For example, you might want to create a segment of super-engaged subscribers, people who have referred 3+ people and whose last referral is less than 1 week ago.

In that case, you simply need to click on Add and add an additional condition.

Step 3: When you've added all your conditions, click on Preview segment. MailChimp will show all the subscribers that currently match your conditions. Click on Save Segment to save your segment.

So you've created a segment in Mailchimp.

Now you can target specific segments with targeted emails and/or automations.

For example, you can:

MailChimp's conditional merge tag blocks is one of their most powerful features.

In short, it allows you to insert dynamic content into your email campaigns, enabling you to show different content to different subscribers based on their custom fields.

When you run a referral program, you might want to display a different message to your subscribers depending on some conditions, such as how many referrals they have.

This can be a fantastic way to show targeted copy and foster greater engagement.

Imagine a scenario in which you have two rewards:

In this example, we are going to show a different message to our subscribers depending on how many referrals they have:

As you can see, the goal is to increase engagement by focusing only on their next step.

Step 1: Familiarize yourself with MailChimp's conditional merge tags blocks. Click here and read this support article.

Step 2: Go to your newsletter template and add the following text in a text block:

Feel free to update the copy but pay attention to how the conditional merge tags are used.

When you're done, the "Refer-a-friend" section in your newsletter should look like this:

Step 3: It's very important that you test your conditional block with all possible scenarios. In our case, we want to test these scenarios

You can send a test email to yourself and change the value of the RH_TOTREF custom field in your test subscriber's profile each time.

However, the easiest way to test this is to preview the email by entering Preview mode and enabling Live merge tag info. As you switch between subscribers with different RH_TOTREF values, you should see the conditional block changing.

An easy way to do this is to change the value of the RH_TOTREF custom field for a couple of subscribers.

If your conditional block does not work as expected, check out MailChimp's troubleshooting steps and if the problem persists, get in touch and we'll look into it for you.