#924 - Show MailChimp Activity within a Subpanel on Leads/Contacts
Hello,
It would be nice if you could show the SugarChimp subpanel within related modules (Leads/Contacts/etc) in addition to the pop-up display. The pop-up shows live data straight from MailChimp, and while this is a handy tool, it requires that the data on the MailChimp sides stays intact (which is sometimes difficult).
Alternatively, if the data sent to Sugar via the webhook was visible within the Lead/Contact entity, we could see the permanent record. This data already exists and it would be nice to leverage it.
It appears this is default functionality for Sugar relationships, hopefully this could be done. It would be very useful.
Thanks.
Tom.
10 years ago
Hi Tom, good feedback. We don't add the subpanels by default because the data from MailChimp dashlet/connector gets the latest information from MailChimp on the fly (as you point out).
You can definitely add a custom subpanel to your Lead/Contact detail views if you like. You would just need to drop something like the following into custom/Extension/modules/Contacts/Ext/Layoutdefs/sugarchimpactivity_subpanel.php https://gist.github.com/chadhutchins/bef6020d25ae241217ab
After running a Repair & Rebuild you should see the subpanel on the Contact detail view. You would then edit the code and do the same for the Leads module.
You say "it requires that the data on the MailChimp side stays intact (which is sometimes difficult)". Just curious, can you explain a case where you see where MailChimp would not pull all of the data you're looking for?
Thanks!
10 years ago
Thanks for the help. I now have the activity showing up however I've noticed that the MailChimp campaign name only appears mapped to a human-readably value in the edit pane. Is there any way to get the MailChimp campaign name to show up in the list view?
When I mentioned MailChimp data staying intact, I am referring to when lists or merged or removed. Granted these are not every-day procedures, however list management is important to ensure MailChimp doesn't over inflate subscriber numbers. When this happens, I loose any kind of history data for subscribers on the list.
Thanks.
10 years ago
That makes sense on how the activity data could be lost in those cases. Thanks.
So it requires more custom code to do that. It's something we could work into the product, but not anything I could do in the near term. You'll notice the same issue exists on the list view of the SugarChimpActivity module. This fix would fix both places.
Basically you need to create a process_record logic hook for the SugarChimpActivity module. Whenever it fires, you would take the $record->mailchimp_list_id and $record->mailchimp_campaign_id values and look up the MailChimp List name and Campaign name by the IDs. You could then have a couple custom fields on the SugarChimpActivity module mailchimp_list_name and mailchimp_campaign_name and then you would set those values with the human-readable names you looked up. The new name fields are what you would then display in the subpanel views.
Does that make sense?
10 years ago
Thanks for the suggestion.
I have implemented a custom hook as you suggested and the list and campaign names are now being stored within the CRM.
I have noticed one odd thing however. We are currently using both standard campaigns and automations within MailChimp. For campaigns, all hooks seem to be coming across including send, open, and click. However, for automations, the send hook does not appear to come over. I do not see any "send" hooks for emails sent by a automation workflow and we have sent several thousand.
Any thoughts?
Thanks.
10 years ago
That's awesome you implemented that!
I know the campaign emails and automation emails are two separate things for MailChimp. I've reached out to them to see how this would be possible via the api. I'll let you know what they say and what we can do about it.
You say you do not see any "send" hooks. Are you seeing any open or click activities for automation emails coming through?
10 years ago
Thanks for your help.
Yes I am seeing opens and clicks come through for Automations. It just seems to be the send that is not showing up.
Thanks.
10 years ago
Got it, thanks. After hearing from MailChimp and testing a few things out myself, I see how they are doing things behind the scenes now.
It's going to be tricky to implement this in our codebase in a reliable and scalable way for everyone, but there's a way you can manually have SugarChimp update the sends for the automation campaigns.
The way their export api works to get the activity data is that to get the send data, you have to retrieve the entire list of people who receive a campaign along with all of their activity. Because this can be a potentially large api call/response, we only make this call the very first time we get word a new campaign has been sent. Going forward, nightly we check for activity updates (clicks, opens).
For this to work with automation campaigns, where not everyone is sent the campaign initially, we would need to run the full export nightly which could get pretty big/slow over time.
To manually import the sends for automation campaigns, you can go to the sugarchimp_activity_tracker table and set initial_import=1 and last_sync=NULL for the automation campaign id you want to get all of the 'sends' for.
Does that make sense? Knowing this, do you think you can work around what you're wanting? Thanks!
9 years ago
Hi there, were you able to get something to work for your use case?
Let me know if I can close this case for now. Thanks!
9 years ago
I'm going to go ahead and close this case. Comment below or open a new case if you need anything. Thanks!