Mailchimp + Shopify Split – What Do You Do Now?

We’re sure that just about everyone was shocked to hear that Mailchimp and Shopify were separating in late March — ourselves included. To briefly recap, Mailchimp and Shopify decided to part ways due to disagreements in data sharing between the two companies.

In their press release regarding the split, Mailchimp states that Shopify requested access to customer data that they didn’t want to provide and have decided to nix the integration entirely. New users can no longer sign up for the integration, and the final day of service for existing users of the integration is May 12, 2019. TL:DR – it was a nasty break up.

Yikes.

The news came as a shock to many business owners, especially those who rely heavily on both services. Those businesses were left scrambling and given the tough choice of picking one over the other.

Many businesses aptly sided with Shopify, and it’s pretty simple to figure out why. While it’s hard to move your sending to another ESP, it’s even harder to migrate your entire business to a new eCommerce platform.

What to do if you were using Mailchimp & Shopify together

Mailchimp gave Mailchimp/Shopify integration users a bit of a grace period to sort out their email sending until May 12 when the integration will no longer be supported. That said, the time to find a new provider for your emails is now, but first — plan your migration strategy.

Strategizing your migration to a new email solution is critical in mitigating moving pains, and it can set you up for better success down the road if you play your cards right. But where to start?

Audit your lists

Nobody likes auditing their sending practices, but now is as good a time as any. A good starting point is to take a look at your email lists and look at a few different factors: list age, list size, and interests. Which lists are working and getting good engagements? Do they need to be cleaned for junk and old emails? How have you segmented them?

Cleaning and segmenting your lists will help boost your engagement with different campaign initiatives, so consider doing that before you migrate so they’re nice and neat for your new platform. 

Rethink your sending structure

Not everyone is going to have as heavy of a hand in their domains and IPs as others, but it’s still wise to think about how you want your transactional and marketing emails handled. Unless you have a massive sending volume, you’ll likely be on a shared IP with one domain and a few subdomains in the mix to keep things organized. 

Now is an excellent time to take a look at those domains and see how their names hold up. If you have a do-not-reply domain, it’s better to have it listed as something like customer service.domain.com or receipts.domain.com. 

Where can you grow?

A part of what made the partnership between Mailchimp and Shopify so fruitful was the multichannel aspect of how you could reach your customers. If your business was utilizing only email and you’ve always wanted to branch out into SMS or push, you could do that with Mailchimp. 

This transition period is the perfect opportunity to take inventory of which Mailchimp features you took advantage of so you can determine who your next best provider will be moving forward. While you’re at it, look at other communication channels that you may want to branch out into in the future to help determine which providers have the best scalability for your business.

For instance, SMS and Push are great for flash sales, but emails allow you more creativity in a marketing campaign. Emails might be your only form of customer communication right now, but down the line you might want to try out an SMS campaign. Once you have a better idea of how you’re going to scale your communications, you need to think about moving forward. 

Moving on

Now that you have an idea of what you can update and where you want to grow, ask yourself:

Seriously, what now?

You can’t have a digital business without a digital means of communication, which means you need a new provider. Maybe there was a feature Mailchimp lacked that your business could benefit from, or you want something more focused on your eCommerce needs that includes email and a few more features. 

We’ll be honest, Mailgun is amazing for highly technical companies, but we aren’t right for everyone since we don’t offer a front-end email marketing solution as part of our platform. Instead, we partner with front-end solutions that use our infrastructure for faster, easier sending of what they have to offer. 

In this specific case, we feel like a lot of Shopify business owners can find a new home in Omnisend since they have a pretty straightforward and seamless Shopify integration.

Omnisend allows communicating with your audience in a variety of ways (email, SMS, push, etc.) while offering all the automation, visual editing, and campaigns that Mailchimp provided in their previous integration with Shopify. You’ll get our power, their features, and maintain your Shopify business as it was before you left Mailchimp.

How does that work?

Omnisend sits on Mailgun’s infrastructure to provide their customers with great deliverability. Just like with Mailchimp, you won’t have to deal with all the technical complexities of email – Omnisend will handle that for you, so you can focus more on your business, rather than what helps it run. 

Overall, an integration with Omnisend and Shopify will function much as it did with Mailchimp. Except there likely won’t be a public, awkward break-up down the road that you have to suffer through. If you’re interested in switching over to Omnisend from Mailchimp, this migration guide can help streamline the process.