[New Release] SugarChimp 7.7.0

SugarChimp 7.7.0 was a major release for many reasons. We have added many great features into the product, improved functionality, and kept aligned with MailChimp’s newest api. I’ll get into the features and functionality improvements in a bit, but first I want to stress the importance of upgrading api’s.

MailChimp’s API End-of-Life

Without going too geeky, SugarChimp relies very heavily on the ability to communicate with MailChimp from Sugar. We use their api for that. They have recently released a new v3 api that includes some new functionality. We can now create new MailChimp Lists from within Sugar and take advantage of other new subscription management tools. The increase in functionality, while useful, is not a game changer. We could continue to use the old api calls just fine.

However, MailChimp has since announced that they will only be accepting v3 api calls at the end of 2016. So anyone not using the v3 api (SugarChimp 7.5 and below) will no longer be able to sync Sugar with MailChimp.

Haven’t upgraded to 7.7.0 yet? You better soon! The good news is that when you do, you will also get some new features and functionality. I’ve highlighted some of the new features in SugarChimp 7.7 below:

Automated Syncing Features

Arguable the largest feature in this release is the ability to automatically update your target lists. For a long time, our users have had to select from reports manually or use a third party add-on to accomplish these tasks. Now you have the option to keep your lists updated without lifting a finger. Depending on your SugarChimp Plan, you can choose to keep all Contacts, Targets, or Leads on a list or even use filters or SQL to select who should be on a list. I will go more in depth with these options when I talk about our new Ultimate Plan in an upcoming post, but here is a quick glimpse of we can do.

Improved Onboarding Process

As with any integration software, we have strived to make SugarChimp seamless and easy to setup. That starts with an easy-to-use onboarding process. So we went back to the drawing board, literally, and came up with 4 steps that will get our new users up and running in no time. For the interest of this article, I’m only going to highlight the two new steps to the onboarding process.

Step 1: Pre-Checks

When you work with integrations for software as modular as Sugar you find a number of users have issues with network settings, Sugar settings, etc. Our pre-checks page is a quick way for us to identify those issues, before our users get too far. In practice, this will decrease the amount of support calls regarding common issues.

Step 4: Sync a List

We completely reworked how we visualized the syncing of a target list to MailChimp. We broke down the list syncing process into more steps so users can get a feel for what is really happening during this first syncing process. We have added the ability to create a target list or MailChimp list from right within our onboarding process, so that anyone new to Sugar or MailChimp can set up their initial sync within that first 5 minutes of using our software!

MailChimp List Settings Dashlet

The all new MailChimp List Settings dashlet gives users a quick view of the SugarChimp properties for this target list and its synced MailChimp List. It has a section specifically for the MailChimp list which includes list name, subscriber count, open and click rates as well as another section devoted to the automated settings for this list, unique to each module.