The feedback from our users about the Lists feature in PCO People has been overwhelmingly positive. We love seeing how Lists are already being used, but we're not even close to done. We've got tons of ideas being worked on right now which you’ll see in coming weeks and months. One feature in particular is something that we’ve always known would be great, and our churches have confirmed that by asking for it again and again. It took some time to get it just right, and now we're ready to get the first bit of this feature into your hands. Today we're releasing our new Mailchimp integration.
MailWho?
MailChimp. They provide great tools for sending bulk emails. They're so good at it that we use them for all of our own mailings, and we've heard over and over from our users that they do too.
Why Mailchimp?
Sending large amounts of emails successfully every day is very difficult, so we've integrated with Mailchimp because they're really good at it. When you send large volumes of email it becomes more and more difficult to get those messages into people's inboxes instead of their spam folders. Because so much spam is sent every day, spam filters have become very aggressive. Many countries (including the US) have laws in place to try to curb spam, and senders have to stay compliant. We know that MailChimp will give you an unmatched experience in getting those emails sent out and more importantly, delivered to your people.
We feel really strongly that Mailchimp is a great fit for us and that they were the obvious choice for this integration. Mailchimp is powerful, fun, and has great pricing. In fact, we think most of our users will be able to use MailChimp’s free plan and still have lots of room to grow.
How's it work?
If you aren't already a Mailchimp user, you'll need to create an account. Once your Mailchimp account is ready, an organization administrator can connect your PCO account to Mailchimp from the Integrations tab in Accounts. More information about this step is available in our documentation.
After Mailchimp has been connected to your PCO account, you'll be able to sync any list in PCO People to Mailchimp by clicking on the little email icon in the top right of the list results. This will start the synchronization process which may take a few moments, depending on the size of your list. Once synchronization is complete you can click on the button to view the new segment of your Mailchimp list that mirrors your PCO People list. At that point you can start a new message from Mailchimp. More details about syncing lists is available here.
Mailchimp sounds like overkill for me. I just need to send a quick note to a few people.
Hang tight. There's more great stuff in development. ;) For now you can still export your list to CSV and email people through your normal means.
We hope you love this as much as we do!