Sending date based emails with WP Fusion, Mailchimp, and your events plugin

Follow up with event attendees automatically before and after events, using WP Fusion and your favorite marketing automation tool.

Using WP Fusion you can sync event registrations and attendee information from your favorite event plugin to any one of 40+ supported CRMs and marketing automation tools.

In this example we’ll be looking at syncing attendee information from The Events Calendar to Mailchimp, and using that data to send an automated event reminder and followup campaign.

In addition to The Events Calendar, WP Fusion supports all the major event and ticketing plugins for WordPress, and this tutorial will work with any of them. For the documentation on each integration, see:

For some more ideas, check out this post on using WP Fusion with Mailchimp over at The Events Calendar.

And in addition to Mailchimp, WP Fusion supports all the leading CRMs and marketing automation platforms, such as ActiveCampaign, Ontraport, Drip, ConvertKit, and many more.

The concepts covered in this tutorial would work equally well in any platform that has an automation or campaign builder.

#Setup in Mailchimp

To start, log into your Mailchimp account and head to the Audience Fields and Merge Tags settings. Create two new fields, one for Event Name and one for Event Date.

The two new merge fields will allow WP Fusion to sync data from the event registration to the attendee’s Mailchimp subscriber record.

Make sure the Event Date field is a date field, not text field (the date format can be whatever format you prefer).

Finally, while in Mailchimp, let’s create a tag. We’ll use this to trigger automations.

By creating a new tag in Mailchimp, we can later apply this tag to subscribers to trigger automations.

Head to Audience » Tags and add a new tag for Event Registration.

#Setup in WordPress

First make sure that The Events Calendar, Event Tickets, and WP Fusion are installed. You should already have connected WP Fusion to Mailchimp using your API key.

If you haven’t already created an event, you can follow this guide from The Events Calendar on how to create an event, and this guide on how to create a ticket.

#Syncing the event date

Head to the WP Fusion field mapping settings at Settings » WP Fusion » Contact Fields, and enable the two Events fields we created in step one, by selecting the corresponding Mailchimp fields from the dropdowns:

WP Fusion’s field mapping interface lets you associate WordPress data with custom fields in Mailchimp.

#Applying tags

Finally, head to your event in WordPress and click edit on the ticket, and select the Event Registration tag for the Apply Tags setting.

While editing the ticket we can select tags to be applied in Mailchimp when someone RSVPs.

This means that when someone RSVPs for the event (or buys a ticket), the Event Registration tag will be applied to their contact record in Mailchimp.

#Testing it out

Now if we do a test registration, the WP Fusion logs will show the attendee data being synced to Mailchimp, as well as the tags being applied.

The WP Fusion logs show any data being synced to Mailchimp as well as tags being applied.

Note that the event name and event date are also being synced.

Now we can search for the test attendee in Mailchimp, and we’ll see a contact record has been created, and the event fields and tag have been synced.

The attendee’s subscriber record in Mailchimp now contains the event data.
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#Automating emails

Finally, let’s create an automated email sequence that runs in relation to the event date. As a basic example, we’ll send a reminder email three days before the event.

Head to Automations in Mailchimp and create a new automation. As the trigger, choose Tag Added, and select the Event Registration tag.

Click Save Starting Point, and then in the automation builder, add a wait condition. Select Specific Date:

And then for the wait condition, choose 3 days before the Event Date field:

Save the condition. Finally, add an email to the end of the sequence with the information regarding the event.

Pro tip: you can use the merge field for the Event Name custom field we synced to the attendee’s subscriber record to dynamically merge the event name into the reminder email. This is great if you want the same automation to send reminders for multiple events.

Here’s the finished automation:

This automation is triggered when someone registers for the event, and then waits until three days before the event before sending a reminder email.

Now, anyone who registers for your event will automatically receive a reminder email via Mailchimp three days before.

#Event check-ins

You can track event check-ins in Tribe Tickets Plus, and WP Fusion can automatically sync the check-in statuses to Mailchimp for each attendee.

This lets you additionally follow up after the event with attendees, and people who didn’t make it.

For example this automation runs the day after the event, and sends a different email depending on whether or not the attendee checked in at the event

The second half of the automation runs the day after the event, and sends a different email depending on whether or not the attendee checked in at the event.
WP Fusion

Get Automated. Get WP Fusion.

Get WP Fusion today, and automate event reminders and followups with your email marketing tool.

Buy WP Fusion

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