Mailchimp

JewelTrak syncs your customer list to Mailchimp so you can send newsletters, birthday and anniversary campaigns, holiday promotions, and any other email blast — without ever exporting a CSV or copying contacts around. New customers and customer-record edits push automatically in the background.

Who pays for what

• You sign up at mailchimp.com with your own Mailchimp account. Mailchimp’s free plan covers only 250 contacts, so most stores need a paid plan sized to their customer list. Mailchimp charges by the number of contacts in your audience.
• You design templates, segment your audience, and schedule campaigns inside Mailchimp’s editor (it’s the easiest one out there — drag-and-drop, no HTML).
• JewelTrak pushes your customer data — name, email, phone, birthday, anniversary — to your Mailchimp audience automatically. No extra cost.

You can disconnect at any time without losing your Mailchimp audience or subscriber list.

Connecting

1. Get your Mailchimp API key. In Mailchimp, click your avatar (top-right) → Account & billing → Extras → API keys → Create A Key. Copy the key — it looks like abc123def456…-us20.
2. In JewelTrak, go to Settings → Integrations → Mailchimp.
3. Paste the API key and click Connect Mailchimp. JewelTrak validates the key and fetches your audiences.
4. Pick the audience you want your customers synced into. Most accounts have one “Main List” — that’s the right pick. If you have multiple audiences, choose the one for your retail customers.
5. Click Save Audience. JewelTrak adds two custom merge fields to that audience automatically: BIRTHDAY and ANNIVERSAR (Mailchimp limits tags to 10 letters). It also sets up the connection that copies unsubscribes back to JewelTrak.

First-time sync (backfill)

After connecting, click Sync All Now to send every existing customer with an email address to your Mailchimp audience. Mailchimp processes the list on their side, so a few thousand customers can take several minutes. The page shows the progress, and you can leave and come back.

When it finishes you’ll see how many customers are in Mailchimp and how many were skipped for having no email address. If Mailchimp rejected anyone (most often an email address it considers fake or mistyped), each one is listed with Mailchimp’s reason and a link to the customer. Fix the address and save the customer; it syncs on save. You only need to run Sync All Now once after connecting.

From then on, any customer you create or edit in JewelTrak syncs to Mailchimp automatically — no buttons to press.

What gets synced

For every customer with an email address:

JewelTrak field	Mailchimp merge field
Email Address	email_address (primary key)
First Name	FNAME
Last Name	LNAME
Phone Number	PHONE
Birthday	BIRTHDAY (MM/DD format)
Anniversary	ANNIVERSAR (MM/DD/YYYY format)

Customers without an email address are skipped (Mailchimp requires an email to add a member). Vendors and partners aren’t synced — only customers (IsCustomer = 1).

Designing campaigns

JewelTrak doesn’t design email templates — that all happens inside Mailchimp, using their drag-and-drop editor and template gallery. Common campaigns for jewelers:

• Monthly newsletter — new arrivals, store events, repair tips. Send to your whole audience.
• Birthday campaign — automated email that fires on a member’s birthday with a discount code. Use Mailchimp’s automation builder + the BIRTHDAY merge field.
• Anniversary campaign — same idea using the ANNIVERSAR field. Great for proposing the “next piece” idea (push presents, eternity bands, gift suggestions).
• Sale announcements — segment by purchase recency or location.

Mailchimp has hundreds of free templates in their gallery — you don’t need to start from scratch.

Unsubscribes

When a customer clicks “Unsubscribe” in one of your Mailchimp emails, Mailchimp stops sending them campaigns, and JewelTrak marks the customer unsubscribed from marketing email on their record, so JewelTrak’s own marketing emails stop too. Invoices and other transactional emails still send. If Mailchimp removes an address because it keeps bouncing, JewelTrak marks that email as undeliverable.

This only affects your store. The settings page tells you whether unsubscribes are being copied back; if it says they aren’t, click Sync All Now to set it up.

It works the other way too: a customer who unsubscribes through JewelTrak’s preference page is unsubscribed in Mailchimp.

If a JewelTrak customer was previously unsubscribed in Mailchimp, future syncs from JewelTrak will NOT re-subscribe them — Mailchimp’s anti-spam protections prevent that, and our sync respects them. The customer’s merge fields will still update (so their next birthday campaign is accurate if they later re-subscribe).

Disconnecting

Click Disconnect on the Mailchimp card. This removes the API key from JewelTrak. Your Mailchimp audience and all its subscribers stay intact — JewelTrak just stops pushing to it.

Troubleshooting

• “Mailchimp rejected this API key” — Double-check you copied the full key including the -us20 (or your region) suffix. Generate a fresh one in Mailchimp if needed.
• “No audiences found” — Create an audience in Mailchimp first (Audience → Create Audience), then come back to JewelTrak and reconnect.
• A customer doesn’t show in Mailchimp after editing — Most likely the customer has no email address, or Mailchimp rejected it. Run Sync All Now: anyone Mailchimp rejects is listed with the reason.
• Mailchimp’s Contacts page looks empty on a new account — A brand-new Mailchimp account can keep showing its “Add your contacts” welcome screen even after contacts arrive. Search for a customer’s email in Mailchimp’s search bar to confirm they’re there.
• Every customer is rejected with “Please enter a complete address” — Your Mailchimp audience has its Address field set as required. JewelTrak doesn’t send mailing addresses. In Mailchimp, open your audience’s settings, choose “Audience fields and merge tags”, and remove the Address field (making it optional isn’t always enough), then run Sync All Now again.