In this revised series of articles, I will walk through configuring the integration and testing the first Mailchimp campaign driven through the Sage CRM user interface.

I found creating, sending, and tracking email marketing campaigns very easy. The results from the campaign are shown within Sage CRM; you can see how many people opened the email and precisely what they clicked. Mailchimp's offering is very attractive to customers, starting with email-based campaigns, as it is free for subscriber lists with limited contacts. You can see the pricing here: http://mailchimp.com/pricing/

The Integration Features

The integration allows users to:

• Push their Sage CRM contacts into Mailchimp
• Quickly and easily create new targeted email marketing campaigns in Sage CRM
• Send the campaign and automatically add a communication record to the relevant records in Sage CRM
• View a list of sent Mailchimp campaigns in Sage CRM and gain valuable insight into the results - opens, clicks, bounces and more
• Segment lists and create groups based on responses for future campaigns

The articles in the series are:

• Mailchimp - An Introduction
• How to get Mailchimp ready for the integration (Generate the API keys and set up an audience)
• How to set up the Integration within Sage CRM
• Authorising users to access the Mailchimp features
• Creating a Group in Sage CRM and adding it as a segment to a Mailchimp audience
• Creating the campaign in CRM and sending to Mailchimp
• Reviewing the campaign results in Sage CRM and creating groups from responses