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Bulk-Send Guest Tickets Using MailChimp

We envision that you will continue to communicate with your guests before and during the planning of your event with your favorite email marketing platform, utilizing the rich capabilities these platforms offer.  BetterUnite is not an email marketing platform, although we offer some limited bulk-email capabilities within the system, in order to take advantage of the rich emailing needs we recommend using MailChimp, Constant Contact, or Emma platforms for email marketing.

In order to provide these platforms with the guest specific ticket urls, you will need to import this information from your guest list in BetterUnite into your email marketing platform.

Before you begin, first prepare your guest export:

1) Go to your event dashboard in BetterUnite, and click Guests.

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2) Click Actions->Export to File.

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3) Note that on each guest record, there is a column named "Manage Attendance Link".  This link is specific to each guest, and will take them to that specific ticket's confirmation page, allowing them to print, add to wallet, or provide additional details for their ticket.

We will now need to associate these links with the corresponding contact records in your email marketing platform.

MailChimp

You will create a mailing list in MailChimp for your guests, and create a new email marketing campaign to send the specific email, and within this email you will provide a dynamic/merge field so that each recipient will get their specific link. This is similar to how you may insert "first name" into your campaign in MailChimp, referring to the recipient's first name when the email is sent.
 
Before we can import the above details into MailChimp, we will need to create a "custom field" on your contact list to hold the "Ticket Url".  In this article, we will reference this "Ticket Url", however you can name this however you prefer, you may also try creating an event specific url field as well.
 

Add New Audience Field to Store the Ticket URL

To add a new audience field and import your Ticket URLs into it, follow these steps.

  1. Navigate to the Audience tab.
  2. If you have more than one audience, click the Current audience drop-down and choose the one you want to work with.
  3. Click View Contacts.
  4. Click the Settings drop-down and choose Audience fields and *|MERGE|* tags. 
  5. Click Add A Field, and choose Text.
  6. Input a field label, like "Ticket URL".
  7. Uncheck the Visible box next to the new field so it won't appear on your signup form.
  8. In the Put this tag in your content field, input a merge tag name, like TICKETURL. 

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Import CSV file into Your New Audience Field

In the next step, you'll add your contacts' Ticket URL Links to the audience field you created. To add all the links in one large batch through a CSV Import, follow these steps.

 

  • Navigate to the Audience tab.
  • If you have more than one audience, click the Current audience drop-down and choose the one you want to work with.
  • Click the Manage Audience drop-down and choose Import contacts.
  • Click the radio button next to CSV or tab-delimited text file, and click Next.

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  • Upload your CSV file, and click Next.
  • Match column 1 to the Email Address field and click Save. Match column 2 to your PDF Links field and click Save.
  • After you match and save both columns, click Next to review the import.
  • Check the box next to Update existing contacts. 
  • Click Import.
Now each subscriber has a URL in the Ticket URL field.
 

Insert the Merge Tag into Your Campaign 

To complete the process, you'll work in the Campaigns section of the account.

Now that each subscriber has a file in the new Ticker URL audience field you created, place that field's merge tag into your campaign. When the campaign is sent, MailChimp will replace the merge tag with the personalized Ticket URL link from the audience field.

Insert and Test Your New Merge Tag

To insert the merge tag into an email campaign, follow these steps.

  • In the Content section of the Campaign Builder, click Edit Design.

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  • On the Design step, click the content block where you want the personalized URL to appear.
  • Highlight the text you want to link to the personalized file, and click the link icon.
  • In the Insert or Edit link pop-up modal, input your new field's merge tag in the Web Address (URL)field. Type the full merge tag, exactly as it appears in your audience settings.

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  • Click Insert to add the link.
  • Click Save and Close.


To test your merge tags, click Enter Preview Mode to open a preview of the campaign. Click Live Merge Info to test your merge tags.

When you're satisfied with your campaign, send your campaign or schedule it to go out later.
 

Appendix: Step-by-Step Screenshots of the above

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Thank you for reading! Let's go do some good.