When you send your email newsletters, do you get customers asking you to change the email address you have on file, because they’ve changed jobs or something? In the past, you had to log in, find their profile, and then make the edit for them. That’s not so bad, but if you’re like me, after you’ve spent a couple hours writing your newsletter and sending it off, the last thing you want to do is track down a profile to change someone’s address.
Subscribers to your MailChimp lists can now edit their own profiles (email address, name, interest groups, company name, whatever) by just clicking a link in the email footer.
To add the link, use our *|UPDATE_PROFILE|* merge tag. Wherever we see that tag, we’ll replace it with each recipient’s unique link.
If you send regular newsletters to members who might be subscribed for long periods of time, you should assume a lot of members will be changing their email addresses (I hear average email address turnover is about 30% per year). So you’ll want to make it as easy as possible for them to edit their records with you.
This is not something that ALL users will want. Some of you might have some fields you just don’t want subscribers to edit (or even see). Some of you might be syncing MailChimp with your in-house databases (using the MailChimp API), so you’re already using your own “update profile” type of link.
This is great timing asd I’m jsut beginning to look at mailchimp as an alternative to our current provider (you pricing didn’t fit our needs when I made my initial decision, but now it’s similar for our purposes.
Quick related question, since I know you just added interest groups recently as well. I have several different lists with different subscribers and for radically different purposes. If I create interest groups for list A, would those interest groups be visible to members of list B when list B went to edit their profile? i.e. can specific interest groups be applied to only specified lists?
P.
Hi Paul, interest groups are totally unique to each list, and each list is totally separate from each other. And you can have infinitely many lists. To answer your question, people from list A would never see interest groups from list B
Bingo!
As I thought it should be, and a major shortcoming of our current provider. Guess I need to find time to work through a trial of Mailchimp.
Thanks for the quick response.
Paul
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[...] user, you betcha that’s an easy thing to, and it’s already built-in to your account. Just add the *|UPDATE_PROFILE|* tag to your footer, and we’ll do the [...]
I need to shout from the rooftops. MailChimp is by far the best newsletter/contact email service I’ve used it. Intuitive, beautiful and frankly super good looking
(plus who doesn’t love a good monkey!)
Fantastic. Keep up the awesomeness.
To add the link, use our *|UPDATE_PROFILE|* merge tag. Wherever we see that tag, we’ll replace it with each recipient’s unique link.
where is this updated, on the email list we used for the mailing or do we receive a seperate report?
thanks for your help
How do I create a generic link that allows registered users / newsletter subscribers to update their subscription profile (apart from the shortcode that is in the mailchimp generated emails?). Is ther a way to do this?
There’s no way to access to the “Update Profile” page, unless it’s clicked from within an email. It’s for security reasons. We could pwd protect it, but then that gets inconvenient for subscribers. We have another idea in the works.
Hi Ben -
I worry that an email will get forwarded and the recipient will click the Update Profile button and then see the profile of the person who forwarded the email.
How about the Update Profile button, instead of directly opening the edit profile page, send an email to the original email recipient and that have the link to the update profile page?
Hi Ben
Any update on this?
We have a real problem because we have people attempting to sign up for new newsletters via a link on our website, at which point we send them a link to a download. However, if they’re already subscribed then they just get the “name@their-email.com is already subscribed to list My List” error message, and can’t get any further. We then have to explain that they have to find an email that we’ve previously sent them and use the ‘Update Profile’ link on there, or email us (which is inevitably their choice).
It’d be helpful if there was a button available on the ‘Signup Form with Alerts’ form in that case which lets them send themselves an email with the ‘Update Profile’ link on.
Better still, because by the time they’ve received the error they’ve already entered their details onto the signup form, and those details are then lost (and therefore their time is wasted), a better solution would be to only have the email address field visible at first, and then have the form check whether that email address already exists in the list. If it doesn’t then list opens up the other fields for text entry. If the email address does already exist then a button lets them send themselves an email with the ‘Update Profile’ link.
Any comments on that?
ta
Danny
Hi, I’m also interested in a feature that will allow me to direct a user to an update profile page when used with a signup form (like the WordPress plugin). Would also be great if I could pass in the user’s email address so that part of the profile is auto-populated.
hi Andrew
I posted the same message here as this thread seems very quiet:
http://jungle.mailchimp.com/forum/topics/update-profile-link
HTH
Danny
can I use this link in the body of the newsletter? I want to send an email to our full list for people to join a group within that list- so I can send reminder emails to only that group of our list- I want it to be as easy as possible for people to just join this temporary list without being taken off the regular list- I’m thinking that this should be two separate groups within the list
@ben: “We have another idea in the works.”
hi ben, very interested in such a page. when can we have an update of your idea? thanks, flo
Hi Ben, wondering if it’s possible to have just a few selected fields appear in the Update Profile link?
Thanks, Rian
Hmm, have you fiddled with setting some fields to “hidden”?
That sounds exactly like what we need. Where do you hide merge tags from?
[...] wrote this post – but MailChimp does allow your members to update their own details via the Update Profile link included in each email. This is such a fantastic feature, that I would strongly recommend that [...]
Hi MailChimp,
We need to get alerted when someone updates their MailChimp profile so that we can keep our internal database up-to-date. Is this guide [http://apidocs.mailchimp.com/how-to/sync-mailchimp-to-you.php] the only answer? It’s a bit too high-level/programmer-y for our nonprofit’s liking…
Charlotte