Mailchimp Lists and Groups

Mailchimp has two ways of organizing subscribers, lists and groups. Groups are basically just smaller groups within a list, so a list can have several groups, but when a person is on two difference lists Mailchimp considers that person as two completely different people.

As an example of when to use each, if you have a daily and weekly mailing list that is a great way to use groups, but if you have an email list for healthy food and one for science fiction those should be separated by lists.

There are several limitations of lists that really bug me:

  1. By default a person cannot be added to two lists from a single form. (I got around it by using a third party form builder and zapier).
  2. You cannot send the same email to two lists at the same time. While this is annoying, you can simply copy the email and send it to the other list.
  3. If someone is on two lists Mailchimp will not join the two pieces of data together, so you can’t see this person’s overall open and click rate. (There is no solution to this, because Mailchimp is a bunch of jerks… Maybe if I complain about this enough they will add this feature.)

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