Setting Up Targeted Marketing with Mailchimp and Cobot

Morgan -

Getting Started with Mailchimp and Cobot

A few years ago, I was serving as Director of Technology for the Port Workspaces, a multi-location coworking space in Downtown Oakland. I had just returned from Berlin after working on some other interesting projects and wanted to continue helping coworking spaces streamline their operations.

The Port had a little over 400 members across 3 spaces (at the time) and lots of events, workshops and happy hours happening. We had roughly 1 community manager for every 100 members (12 different plans!), so as we scaled, my team would need easy solutions launched to quickly communicate with their members in a targeted way.

Obviously, we’d have to craft different messages to the different segments of our members — but how to do this? Cobot is great for sending one-to-one messages and even group messages, but what about recurring email campaigns? Upcoming events that we wanted to get out to our members?

Where do I even start 🤔?

Enter Cobot’s Mailchimp Add-on.

Cobot’s Mailchimp Add-on

If you’ve already signed up with us, you’ll find that Cobot integrates with lots of other services and Mailchimp is one of them 🐵.

It’s super easy to set up once you’re logged in:

  1. Go to the Mailchimp add-on under Add-ons > Available Add-ons
  2. Select your space
  3. Add your list
  4. Put in an API key from your account on Mailchimp which you can find under Account > Extras > API Keys.
  1. Select the Mailchimp list you would like to connect to.
  2. Sweet. Current existing members and future members will now be added to your list.

However, this happens only if your members have double-opted in. Read on…

A Note About the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation
For your members to be added to Mailchimp, they’ll need to double opt-in as part of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). As the first opt-in step, there is a checkbox on signup where user can choose if they agree to receive such e-mails in the future (this can also be changed in the settings later). Without this approval, it’s not possible to add a member to any list:

Segmenting Your Space’s Data

Now check this out: once your members are added to your Mailchimp list from Cobot, the integration automatically brings in five data points:

  • First name
  • Last name
  • Plan
  • Date added
  • Last changed

You can view this within Mailchimp under Lists > Select your Cobot synchronized list.

See that ‘Plan’ in the 4th column? That’s what we’ll use to create segments.

Hot tip: Use Mailchimp’s Segments instead of Lists. Mailchimp charges by the number of emails you have on your account and counts individual emails of all your lists towards that number — even if the same email is on multiple Lists.

Segmenting Your Mailchimp List

To define and save a Segment, you can follow these simple steps:

  1. Select Segments > Create a Segment
  2. Select the sorting type (in this case, your Plan) and the value it should match (‘flex desk’, part-time or however your plans are named)
  3. Preview the segment to ensure it is including the correct information, then click Save as Segment.
  4. Name the segment and make sure to keep the auto-update box selected.
  5. Done!

Now when you need to send a recurring or marketing email to your members, you can set it to send to your specific segment.

If you’d like to get in to the details of this Mailchimp integration — check out our detailed guide on targeted marketing using Cobot’s Mailchimp Add-on.

If you aren’t already using Cobot as your coworking management software, give it a go! You’ll find that our features can help you run your coworking space more effectively and grow your community. Just sign up for a free trial or a live demo session. And if you have questions, our support team is all ears!

Happy Coworking!