Subscriber Alerts by Email

Just because you want it, doesn’t mean you get it!

One thing many Mailchimp users want when they get started is an alert when something happens.

They want to know when someone signs up to their audience.

They want to know when someone unsubscribes from their audience.

Once you get into things, this daily flow of information should not actually be required because the sheer numbers make it impossible to keep track of things… and also, if you’re doing things right, you should have automations in place to communicate with new subscribers.

Setting up Alerts

However, if you don’t, or if you just want to keep tabs on things, you are able to set up alerts to let you know when someone joins or leaves your audience.

Just go to your Mailchimp Account, Click on Audience, select the audience you want to get alerts from, and then click settings and then audience name and defaults.

At the bottom of this page you can select the tick boxes that trigger the alerts to an email address you provide.

However, I’ve recently discovered that this doesn’t always happen!

A client of mine asked me why she hadn’t received an alert from Mailchimp when a new subscriber signed up via a form we’d created on her website.

All the right boxes were ticked in Mailchimp… and yet the alert wasn’t being sent!

I was confused.

Alerts don’t always get sent!

So I dived onto the ever helpful Mailchimp chat function and got hold of the guys at Chimp HQ, who highlighted something that I wasn’t aware of.

Under normal circumstances, the alerts would be sent when a new subscriber joined… but there are some conditions that they won’t!

The subscriber notification only triggers for subscribers that have either signed up via a Mailchimp signup form (i.e. not a 3rd party one/one that connects via an API) OR are added via an API, but with Double Opt In Activated.

This was something I didn’t know and explained why the alerts from Mailchimp weren’t being triggered for my client.

So, if you’re sitting there waiting for a flood of alerts from new subscribers, and the flood is more of a trickle… it might be your set up doesn’t trigger Mailchimp’s new subscriber alert email.

A workaround

However, if you are using Mailchimp to send an automated welcome or confirmation email, you can set up so that the automation sends you an alert every time it fires – thus getting around this challenge and meaning you can get all the alerts you want!

To do this, find your automation and click edit.  Then at the top click edit settings and just underneath the 3 text boxes, there’s a tick box for “send activity digest email”. Click that and you’re away…

Of course, don’t blame me if you get inundated with alerts… or you could always switch them off!