Ask your future guests’ permission to contact them

Later on we’ll show you how to sync the contacts of people who have bought tickets to your event on Quicket with Mailchimp. Here’s how to make sure that each and every one of these people that gets added to your Mailchimp account going forward has given you the legal permission needed to contact them.

You can do this at any point from when your event is in draft mode on Quicket and you have access to your event’s dashboard.

1. Log into your Quicket account.


2. Under ‘My Events’ in the menu, select ‘Manage Events’.


3. Select ‘Manage’ next to the event from which you will want to sync contacts to Mailchimp.


4. You’ll now be on your Dashboard. From the menu, look for the ‘Checkout’ tab and click on ‘Collect Info’.


5. Select ‘Add Question’.


6. From the options that appear, select the predefined question "Would you like the organiser to contact you in the future?" then click ‘Add Question’. It’s important that you select this exact question and do not create your own, as the backend of this question will ensure that those who answer ‘No’ in response to this question will not be added to your Mailchimp audience/s.

1  Head to the ‘Audience’ tab in your Mailchimp account. You’ll see your Audience there, titled with the name of your business - this is good.

Next, select ‘Manage Audience’ then ‘Settings’ from the drop-down menu and check the settings below. Select ‘Audience and Campaign Defaults’ from the options shown to you.

• Double-opt in - enabled or disabled
  
  Scroll down to the ‘Form settings’ section. Under form settings, you’ll see the ’Enable double opt-in’ check box.
  
  Double opt-in means that when somebody signs up to your mailing list from your signup form on Mailchimp, they’ll receive an email to double-check that they want to sign up.
  
  We recommend leaving this unchecked, as, although it will result in a more engaged list of people, it will reduce the number of people you can send emails to.


• Are any of your audience EU-based?
  
  If any of your ticket buyers may be EU-based, you’ll need to follow GDPR process and check the ‘Enable GDPR fields’ setting.


• Check your ‘Default From email address’
  
  Scroll down to the ‘Campaign defaults’ section. Under campaign defaults, check the email address listed under the ‘Default From email address’. If you signed up with your personal email address and your event has a branded email address, rather enter that email address under this field. This is the email address that will show when people receive emails from you. Important: it needs to be a real, functioning email address!
  
  If you’ve been using your own personal email thus far, we recommend setting up a branded email address to use instead. The best option is if you have your own website, you can have a [email protected] email address based on your web address. Speak to your web developer about creating one for you or look up how to do this with your website’s hosting provider.
  
  If you don’t have a website, you can easily create a second-best option on Gmail, so that you’ll have a [email protected] email address. If you’re not sure how to do this, click here for more info.
  
  Either way, once you’ve got that set up, you can redirect any emails sent to the old email address to your new email address. This way, people that still have your old email address or find printed material with your old email address on can still get in touch with you. How you do this depends on the email provider you’ve been using, so look up instructions relevant to whether you’re using Gmail, Outlook, etc. And remember to update your email address across social channels, etc!


• Check your ‘Default From email name’
  
  The ‘Default From name’ will display in the inbox next to the subject line of your emails that you send to show who the email is from.
  
  It might currently show your own name. It’s best to use your event brand’s name here as it adds a level of professionalism and makes it clear that your emails are about your events.
  
  Decide who you want your ticket buyers to receive emails from and update this accordingly.

2  Next, click ‘Save Audience and Campaign Defaults’.

Then, scroll up and click on ‘Settings’ from the secondary menu bar, and select ‘Required email footer content’ from the drop-down menu that appears.

• Remind people how they signed up to your audience
  
  You’ll see a default message under ‘Permission reminder’. This is unlikely to apply perfectly for your event. Here, rather enter something along the lines of “You’re receiving this email because you signed up to receive information about new events from Exciting Events or because you’ve previously attended an event run by Exciting Events.”
  
  This gets included in the footer of your email and is important with letting recipients of your emails know that you’re not spamming them - people often forget where they’ve handed out their contact details.


• If you have a website...
  
  If you have a website for your event brand, we recommend adding a signup form to your site where users can opt in to receive updates from you. If you plan to do this, we’ll help you a little later, but in the meantime - add your web address in the ‘Website URL’ field. Use your Quicket page link if you don't have a website.

3  Next, click ‘Save’.

Here’s how to create your groups:

1. If you’re not already on the ‘Audience’ tab in your Mailchimp account, select it from the top menu bar.


2. In the section below your Audience’s main info (name, number of contacts and number of subscribers), find the ‘Manage Contacts’ heading and from the drop down options that appear, select ‘Groups’.


3. Click ‘Create Groups’.


4. You’ll be prompted to select how group options are shown on your signup form. We’ll go through signup forms in the next section, but the signup form is the backend structure for how people get added to your mailing list, regardless of where they come from. If the groups you’re creating now are to indicate which events a person attended, or are for anything that does not get shown to your customers, select ‘Don’t show these groups on my signup form’.


5. Give your groups a category to link them together. Something like ‘Event editions’ or similar would work to indicate that these groups are referring to the events you’ve run.


6. For each event that you’ve run in the past on Quicket (that you have asked permission of your ticker buyers to contact), add a group name. You’ll see three available fields for this, and if you need more, click ‘Add Group’ to add as many fields as you need. If you only have one past event - that’s perfect too!


7. Once all your groups are added, click ‘Save’!

Here’s how to build and design your signup form:

1. Click on the ‘Audience’ tab if you’re not already on it in your Mailchimp account.


2. Then, click on ‘Manage Audience’ and select ‘Sign up forms’.
   
   Note: If you haven’t already verified your email address that you want to send mails from, you’ll need to do so now first if prompted.
   
   You’ll see there are a few different options here. Once you’re done with this section (or lesson or course) you can come back here and check out the other form options which, among other things, allow you to embed your form into your website and build a pop-up form. Here’s a further resource on these.


3. From the options, select ‘Form Builder.’ You’ll see your forms URL here - this is the link you will give to people to sign up to your mailing list., but more on this later.


4. You’ll see what the structure of your form contains on the left, and on the right, the options to build the fields of your form.
   
   You may be tempted to add a lot of fields here, but be warned: the more you add, the less people will sign up to hear from you. We recommend keeping this form short: first name and email address is essentially all you need, but you can add a category of events multiple choice checkbox too, if you like.
   
   If you’ll need more information from people for your event, rather use Quicket’s collect info feature for people to fill in event-specific details in when they buy their tickets. This info will still be synced to your Mailchimp audience.


5. Next, click on ‘Design It’. Here you can customise how your form looks. You can use all your brand colours, add logos, etc.


6. Once you’re happy, copy the URL and paste it in a new tab to check that you’re happy with it. Keep this URL handy for the next section.

1  To start:

Click on the ‘Audience’ tab at the top of the page, then scroll down a bit on the page, and click on the ‘Import Your Contacts’ button. Alternatively you can select ‘Manage Audience’ then ‘Import contacts’ from the drop down menu that appears.

2  Add your data:

Select the option you want to use. If you have multiple lists or want to use more than one of these, you can do so afterwards - you can always add contacts to your list at any time.

Make sure your permission and your non-permission lists are separate. You’ll upload them separately. This is because the settings you apply to a list that you upload will apply to the whole list, and you need to use different settings for your permissioned (subscribed) versus non-permissioned (non-subscribed) contacts. If your list is mixed in any way, rather split it accordingly and upload them separately with the appropriate settings.

Very important when uploading contacts: remember that Mailchimp is free for your first 2,000 subscribers, so it’s best to clean your data to make sure that you only upload quality contacts. If you add contacts exceeding the 2,000 threshold, Mailchimp will need to bill you.

• If you select the ‘CSV or tab-delimited file’ option:
  
  Make sure your document has headings, and is named clearly enough that you’ll know what’s what, e.g. email addresses have the header ‘Email’, Name has the header ‘First Name’, Last name has the header ‘Last name’, etc. You can include any and all information that you have here - phone numbers, dietary requirements, etc.
  
  If the contacts you’re uploading are from different events and you’re using a file of the info, make sure you’ve created your groups before uploading them - you’ll assign them to a group in the next step.
  
  Select ‘Browse’, then select a file from your computer and click ‘Continue To Match’ to upload it. Click here to carry on below in this lesson.


• If you select the ‘Copy/paste from file’ option:
  
  Make sure your document has headings, and is named clearly enough that you’ll know what’s what, e.g. email addresses have the header ‘Email’, Name has the header ‘First Name’, Last name has the header ‘Last name’, etc. You can include any and all information that you have here - phone numbers, dietary requirements, etc.
  
  If the contacts you’re uploading are from different events, it may be best to split them into different lists and upload each list separately so that you can assign each upload to the correctly-named group for that specific event that you created earlier.
  
  Open your file on your computer, copy all the data in your sheet, then paste it into the ‘Paste subscriber info’ section.
  
  Check the box about billing and the number of subscribers, then click ‘Continue To Match’ to upload your data. Click here to carry on below in this lesson.


• If you select the ‘Integrated service’ option:
  
  Select the service you want to link to your Mailchimp list, then click ‘Continue To Setup’.
  
  Follow the prompts to sync your data. Then click here to carry on below in this lesson.
  
  If the contacts you’re syncing are from different events, perhaps sync them a batch at a time so you can assign them to the appropriate event-specific group that you created earlier.

3  Match your columns:

Next, you’ll then need to match the columns from your imported information to fields for your list on Mailchimp.

Check and fix all the matched columns to check that Mailchimp has matched your data correctly, and match any columns labeled as ‘(unmatched column)’. To do this, click on ‘Edit’, select an option from the drop down to choose what you want to label that data as, and click ‘Save’. Do this for each column you want to match or fix. When you’re happy, click ‘Continue To Organise’ to carry on.

4  Organise your data:

On this next screen you can organise your contacts, add or create tags for them, and add them to relevant groups. Tags could be things such as ‘Existing list’ ‘Test’, ‘Cape Town’, etc. Don’t go overboard, and think carefully and strategically about the tags you use and why you need them before you create them. Rather leave this section if you don’t have a use for tags yet - you can always create tags later and assign contacts to them. Note: ‘Tags’ are different to the ‘Groups’ you’ve already created.

If you’ve created your groups, you’ll be given the option to select which group you would like the contacts from this event to link to. Select your top-level group category, and then the relevant group name.

Here - and this is a very important bit - you’ll also choose the status of the list of contacts that you’re uploading. If the list you’re uploading is one that has not given you permission to email them about your events, select ‘Non-Subscribed’ from the options. Select ‘Subscribed’ only if you know that every contact on your list has given you digital permission to email them. You can also select ‘Unsubscribed’ or ‘Cleaned’ if the description of any of these options apply to the list you are uploading. Remember: this applies to your whole list, so if your list is mixed, rather split it according to this breakdown and upload each list one at a time so that you can allocate these labels appropriately.

If you’ve imported contacts before and would like this new contact data to update any older contacts, select ‘Update existing contacts’.

Click ‘Continue To Review’.

5  Review and import:

Check you’re happy with everything, edit anything you need to, and click ‘Import’ to import your data.

★  If you want to add more contacts:

You’ll find yourself on the ‘Audience’ tab of your Mailchimp account. Select the ‘Add Contacts’ heading from the table, then select ‘Import contacts’ to import more and repeat the above.

Link your Quicket events to your Mailchimp audience and groups:

You can easily do this from any event you have on Quicket - whether it’s a past event, or an upcoming one that’s not live yet.

For future events or events that are in draft mode on Quicket, it’s important that you set up a question asking for this permission before going live with your ticket sales, to ensure that you’re legally allowed to contact those guests. To add permission questions on Quicket properly, follow the section ‘The proper permissions and how to get them’ first then come back here.

1. Log into your Quicket account.


2. Under ‘My Events’ in the menu, select ‘Manage Events’.


3. Select ‘Manage’ next to the event which has the data you’re looking to sync.


4. You’ll now be on your Dashboard. From the menu bar, look for the ‘ Integrate’ tab and click on ‘Mailchimp’.


5. If you have not yet connected a MailChimp account, you’ll see the option to ‘Connect My Mailchimp Account’. Select this, then log into your Mailchimp account to connect it.


6. Once back on the Mailchimp integration page on your Quicket dashboard, you’ll now see your list displayed. Select the ‘Link’ button to tell Quicket to use that list to add all your contacts to.


7. If you’ve created your groups, you’ll be given the option to select which group you would like the contacts from this event to link to. Select the relevant group (i.e. the category you made to house the event editions groups), then select the relevant group name and click ‘Save’ and then ‘Done For Now’.


8. That’s it! You can now email the contacts from that event directly from Mailchimp. Your Mailchimp list will automatically be updated any time anyone buys a ticket for your event on Quicket.

Do this for each of your past Quicket events that you have the permission question set on, as well as for each future event you do on Quicket with the permission question. You’ll soon have a very useful, interested audience you can reach out to via email about your events.

Asking non-subscribed contacts to opt in:

1. Head to the ‘Audience’ on the top menu bar. Click on ‘Manage Audience’ then select ‘View Audiences.’


2. Click on the name of your audience.


3. Click on the ‘Export Audience’ button.


4. Your exported data will be emailed to you. Head to your email and download the data.


5. Unzip the folder. You’ll see Mailchimp beautifully separates your subscribed and non-subscribed contacts. Open the non-subscribed file in Excel.


6. Select all these email addresses, and copy them to your clipboard. (You’re likely to have many more contacts than we have in our example here.)


7. Head to your email client where you usually contact these people and start a new email. Paste these contacts in the BCC field.


8. Draft your email to these contacts, and - be sure to include your link to your signup form! Hit send when you’re all done.

Any of these non-subscribed contacts that opt-in will be updated and subscribed on your Mailchimp audience so that you can contact them.