About Mailchimp for Shopify Syncing

Mailchimp for Shopify automatically sends your Shopify customer and order data to Mailchimp. After you connect, you can create targeted e-commerce campaigns, generate product recommendations, and more.

In this article, you’ll learn how data syncing works between Mailchimp and Shopify.

Contact syncing

Contact syncing works differently in the initial sync than in continuing, ongoing sync operations. During the initial sync, existing subscribed Mailchimp contacts won’t be unsubscribed even if their Shopify status is marked as unsubscribed or transactional. Instead, they’ll be marked as subscribed in your Shopify customer list. The ongoing sync sends all updated data from Shopify to Mailchimp.

Initial sync

Before the initial sync, you’ll select a Mailchimp audience to sync to your Shopify store. We’ll sync your existing Shopify customers to your Mailchimp audience as contacts. The sync includes their Shopify subscription status and excludes any subscribed contacts that already exist in your Mailchimp audience. For existing Mailchimp contacts who have opted in to receiving marketing messages, we’ll update their Shopify status to subscribed, even if they had been marked as unsubscribed or transactional there previously.

Continuing syncs

Once the initial sync transfers your historical Mailchimp audience data to your Shopify store, ongoing syncs update your Mailchimp audience with the latest information from your Shopify store. You’ll collect more contacts as new customers make a purchase or sign up via your Shopify signup form. Future orders will continue to sync automatically.

Note the following specifics:

• New Shopify customers who opt in to receive email marketing at checkout sync to Mailchimp as subscribed contacts. New Shopify customers who choose not to receive email marketing sync to Mailchimp as non-subscribed contacts.
• Mailchimp contacts who are already subscribed remain subscribed even if they don't opt in to receiving marketing emails at checkout.
• Mailchimp contacts who begin as unsubscribed and then opt to receiving marketing emails during checkout, will be updated to subscribed in Mailchimp.

The subscribed status is kept in sync in both directions between Shopify customers and Mailchimp contacts. If you manually mark a customer as unsubscribed in Shopify, they’ll be updated to unsubscribed in Mailchimp and vice versa. If you manually mark a customer as subscribed in Shopify, they’ll be updated to subscribed in Mailchimp and vice versa. The activity logs in the Mailchimp for Shopify app can help you identify when an update was synced for a particular customer.

Activity logs

Mailchimp for Shopify’s activity logs show you recent integration activity. Use them to identify when a particular customer was updated or synced. To view these logs, click the Activity Logs tab from the Mailchimp app page in your Shopify store.

Behavioral syncing

A customer event is an action your Shopify customer takes while using your store. Analyzing these actions can help you understand how customers engage with your business. Within Mailchimp, you can use these synced events to create and trigger marketing automations.

Currently, Mailchimp for Shopify syncs the following customer events:

• page_viewed
• product_viewed
• search_submitted
• product_added_to_cart
• payment_info_submitted
• checkout_started
• checkout_completed
• collection_viewed

For more information about how you can use these synced events, check out Create a Customer Journey and All the Starting Points.

Customer events are synced from your Shopify store to your Mailchimp audience by default. You can turn off behavioral syncing from your Mailchimp for Shopify dashboard. Scroll to Customer Events and click Deactivate.

Sync timing

All fields except the promo code field sync in near real time. The promo code field syncs every few hours, but you can always trigger a manual sync from the Mailchimp app in your Shopify admin account.