You can put a Simplesat survey in any email you build in Mailchimp, such as a campaign or a template. When Mailchimp sends the email, it fills in each contact's email and name, so you know who left every response. This works with survey code pasted straight into the email, without connecting Mailchimp.
Connect Mailchimp if you also want each contact's latest rating and sentiment saved on their Mailchimp contact as merge fields, as tags, or both. Then you can build Mailchimp segments on them.
What the Mailchimp integrations do
The Mailchimp page in Simplesat lists its integrations under Survey integrations:
Integration | What it does |
Sync feedback to contact's custom merge fields | Saves the contact's latest rating for each metric, and their latest sentiment, in merge fields |
Add rating and sentiment to contact tags | Tags the contact with their latest rating and sentiment |
By default, each integration runs on responses from every survey in your workspace, because its When should this integration run? setting starts at Every response from all current and future surveys. With Let me choose, it runs only on the surveys you switch on, and any survey you create later starts off.
Before you start
Every Simplesat plan includes the Mailchimp integrations.
In Simplesat, connecting Mailchimp and switching integrations on takes the Manage integrations permission. Owner and Admin have it by default.
In Mailchimp, connect as the account's Owner or as someone with the Admin or Manager user level. The connection can only do what that person can do, and the integrations need to edit contacts and add audience fields.
If your security team wants to know what a connected tool can read and write, point them to Integration security, permissions and data flow.
Connect Mailchimp
On the Integrations page, open Mailchimp and click Authenticate.
Sign in to Mailchimp and click Allow.
Back in Simplesat, the page shows Authenticated with Mailchimp. Click Activate integration on each integration you want.
A workspace connects to one Mailchimp account, and the integrations search every audience in it.
Send surveys from Mailchimp
Create or open the survey and choose External email embed.
Under Choose where to add your survey, choose Mailchimp.
On Publish, click Generate embed code.
Choose HTML and click Copy survey.
In Mailchimp, open the email in the email builder.
Add a Code block where you want the survey, and paste the code into it.
Save the email.
The email shows the question your metric rating comes from, with its rating icons or numbers. When a contact clicks a rating, it's saved and the rest of the survey opens in their browser.
The survey links use these merge tags to pass the following to Simplesat:
the customer's email:
*|EMAIL|*the customer's first name:
*|FNAME|*the customer's last name:
*|LNAME|*the customer ID, set to the contact's unique ID in Mailchimp:
*|UNIQID|*the ticket subject, taken from the email's subject line:
*|MC:SUBJECT|*a ticket field named
listId, holding the audience's ID:*|LIST:UID|*
If you'd rather put the survey behind a button or a line of text, choose Link instead of HTML in step 4. You get a plain link that opens the survey at its first question and carries the same merge tags.
Mailchimp emails have no ticket ID, so every click on a rating creates a new response, even a second click from the same contact.
Heads up: Mailchimp doesn't fill in contact merge tags in its test emails, so a rating clicked in one comes in without an email.
To test, send the email to a segment that holds only your own contact, click a rating, and find the response on the Feedback page. If an integration is on, wait at least five minutes and then look at your contact in Mailchimp. For a full check, follow Testing an integration end to end.
Feedback in Mailchimp
Simplesat finds the Mailchimp contact by the response's customer email. If a response has no email, or its email isn't a contact in your account, the response is skipped and no new contact is created.
Writes happen no sooner than five minutes after a response arrives, and again whenever the response changes. Hidden and spam responses aren't sent. For how timing and survey settings work in every tool we write feedback to, read Writing feedback back, and mapping the fields.
Sync feedback to contact's custom merge fields
The integration saves to five merge fields, one for each metric and one for sentiment:
Field label | Merge tag | Type |
Latest Simplesat sentiment |
| Text |
Latest Simplesat CSAT rating |
| Number |
Latest Simplesat NPS rating |
| Number |
Latest Simplesat CES rating |
| Number |
Latest Simplesat 5-star rating |
| Number |
A response updates only the field for its own metric and the sentiment field, so a CSAT response leaves the NPS, CES and 5-star fields as they were. If the email is in more than one audience, the contact is updated in each one.
Ratings are saved as numbers: 0 to 10 for NPS, 1 to 5 for CSAT and 5-star, and 1 to 7 for CES. Sentiment is positive, neutral or negative. Only the metric rating is saved, not comments or other answers.
If an audience doesn't have these fields yet, the integration creates all five the first time it updates a contact in that audience. It hides them from your signup forms.
Heads up: You can rename the fields in Mailchimp, but don't change their merge tags. The integration writes to the merge tags.
For example, you could segment contacts whose Latest Simplesat sentiment is negative, or whose Latest Simplesat NPS rating is 9 or 10.
Add rating and sentiment to contact tags
A positive NPS response of 9 adds simplesat_nps_9 and simplesat_sentiment_positive to the contact. Other metrics follow the same pattern: simplesat_csat_4, simplesat_ces_6, simplesat_5-star_5.
Before it adds the new tags, it removes the contact's earlier Simplesat CSAT, NPS, CES and sentiment tags. The contact's other tags stay.
Change the Mailchimp account
To move the integrations to a different Mailchimp account:
Click Revoke access. Both integrations stop.
Click Authenticate, and sign in to the other Mailchimp account.
Click Activate integration on each integration you use. Each one stays off until you do this, and responses that arrive in the meantime aren't sent to Mailchimp.
In the new account, the integrations create the merge fields and tags the first time they update a contact.
Survey code that's already in your Mailchimp emails keeps working through the change, because it doesn't use the connection. To survey from the new account, copy the survey code into its emails.
Troubleshooting
Responses from my Mailchimp emails come in anonymous
A response gets a customer when its survey link carries the contact's email. Mailchimp fills that in from *|EMAIL|* when it sends the email. Check these:
Code copied from Generic Embed has no Mailchimp merge tags, so responses from it have no customer unless the respondent types in their name and email. Copy the code again with Mailchimp chosen.
Mailchimp doesn't fill in contact merge tags in test emails, so ratings clicked in a test email come in without an email. To test, send a real email to a segment that holds only your own contact.
If the merge tags were changed when the code was pasted, the link carries the wrong values. Copy the code from Simplesat again and paste it into a Code block.
Without a customer email, the Mailchimp integrations also skip the response.
Each new response from my Mailchimp email replaces the last one
This happens when the survey code gives every click the same ticket ID. Older Simplesat code used the email's ID, *|CAMPAIGN_UID|*, as the ticket ID, and some code was edited to add a fixed ticket ID by hand. Simplesat keeps one response per ticket ID for each survey, so each click updates that same response.
To fix it, copy the code from Simplesat again with Mailchimp chosen, and replace the code in your Mailchimp emails. The current code has no ticket ID, so every click creates a new response.
Mailchimp shows Simplesat as connected, but I can't activate the integrations
Activate integration only works once the Mailchimp page in Simplesat reads Authenticated with Mailchimp. If the page still shows Authenticate, the connection didn't finish on Simplesat's side, even if Mailchimp lists Simplesat as connected. Click Authenticate and sign in again.
If Mailchimp shows an error, such as "400 Bad Request", contact us and include the error.
My Mailchimp integrations stopped, but the page still says Authenticated with Mailchimp
The integrations fail if Simplesat was removed in Mailchimp under Integrations → Manage, or if the Mailchimp user who connected lost access or was removed. The page doesn't change, because Simplesat doesn't check the connection again after you connect.
To reconnect:
Click Revoke access.
Click Authenticate, and sign in as a user with the Owner, Admin or Manager level.
Click Activate integration on each integration.
If the page shows an error message, look it up in Integration error messages and what they mean.
Some of my Mailchimp contacts don't get the merge fields or tags
Check each of these:
The response has a customer email, and a Mailchimp contact has that email. The integrations don't create contacts.
The response arrived after you activated the integration. Earlier responses aren't sent.
If the integration is set to Let me choose, the survey is switched on. New surveys start off.
At least five minutes have passed since the response arrived.
The response isn't hidden or marked as spam.
The merge fields still have their merge tags:
SENTIMENT,CSAT,NPS,CESandFIVESTAR.
If all of that checks out, send us the response's link and we'll check the integration's log.
FAQ
Do I need to connect Mailchimp to send a survey in a campaign?
No. Survey code pasted into a Mailchimp email works without a connection, and responses come in with the contact's details. Connecting is for saving ratings on Mailchimp contacts.
Why does one contact have two responses from the same email?
Mailchimp emails have no ticket ID, so every click on a rating creates a new response. That includes a second click from the same contact.
Can my contacts answer the whole survey inside the email?
No, only the rating. The email shows the question your metric rating comes from. Clicking a rating saves it and opens the survey in the browser, where the contact answers any other questions.
Can I link to the survey instead of showing the rating icons?
Yes. In Generate embed code, choose Link and click Copy survey. Then put the link behind a button or text in your Mailchimp email. It opens the survey at its first question and carries the same merge tags as the rating icons.
Does a CSAT response clear a contact's NPS field?
No. A CSAT response updates only the CSAT field and the sentiment field. The NPS, CES and 5-star fields keep the contact's latest rating for those metrics.
My contact is in more than one audience. Which one gets the merge fields?
All of them. The integration updates the contact in every audience the email is in, and creates the merge fields in any audience that doesn't have them yet.
When do the Latest Simplesat fields show up in my audience?
The first time Sync feedback to contact's custom merge fields updates a contact in that audience. For that to happen, a response needs a customer email that belongs to a contact in the audience, and at least five minutes need to pass after it arrives.
Can I send comments or other answers to Mailchimp?
Not with these integrations. They save the metric rating and its sentiment. To send comments or other answers, use Zapier or Make. A new Simplesat response can start a Zap or a scenario that updates the Mailchimp contact.