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This document explains how to use the Crossing Minds recommendations in Mailchimp in campaigns to send emails. (Workflows are out of scope)

To store and insert the recommendations in Mailchimp, Merge Fields will be used by item property and recommendation. For example, if you want to generate 2 recommendations with the title and image properties, the merge fields will look like: reco_1_title , reco_1_image , reco_2_title , reco_2_image.

Merge fields limitation

• The maximum 30 merge fields and 80 for premium plans.
• The maximum of 255 bytes in the values.

More details here.

Note: In case that the Crossing Mind team is taking care of steps 2 and 3, Admin or Manager level access to the Mailchimp dashboard must be granted to Crossing Minds.

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1. Generating CSV file with Recommendations

The Crossing Minds applied ML team will handle this step by generating a CSV file containing the recommendations. The item property and the desired number of recommendations per user need to be specified.

The CSV file should adhere to the following specifications:

• Use a comma (,) as the separator.
• Each user should occupy a single row.
• Columns should represent item properties and recommendations.
• The email column must be included in the file, as Mailchimp uses it as the identifier for updating the merge fields.

Example Output:

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Once the file is generated, it will be sent by the Crossing Minds team using any preferred method. (email, google drive, oneDrive, S3, Google storage, etc)

2. Importing CSV file in Mailchimp

This step will be done by the customer using the Mailchimp dashboard. The steps are:

1. Go to All contacts → Add contacts → Import contacts.
2. Select Upload a file and proceed.
3. Choose the CSV file and proceed.
4. Enable the option Update any existing contacts. Select groups and status if necessary, and continue.
5. Choose tags if necessary and continue.
6. If all merge fields exist for each column in the file, click Finish import. If any columns do not exist, click on each one and select Create a new field. Use the same column name as the field label, choose the Text type, and click Confirm.

More information here covering all options to import files in Mailchimp.

3. Using recommendations in email

In this step, recommendations (merge fields) are inserted into the email template using either a block of text or HTML code.

For a text block, utilize the combo box Merge Tags to select the appropriate merge field. Refer to the images below for reference.

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In the case of inserting an image, use the following code either within a text block using the source button or within a block of HTML code:

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For more information on using merge fields, consult the Mailchimp documentation here.

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