Playbooks
Segment a campaign with player data
Turn these fields into Mailchimp segments worth sending to.
Sync your players with Mailchimp
Choose a direction and a field set during setup.
The three directions
Change it any time. Switching from pull to a direction that sends starts pushing on the next sync, and switching away stops it just as quickly.
Choosing a direction that sends confirms your players agreed to hear from you. Userplay records that confirmation once and will not push contacts without it. A pull-only setup never needs one, because nothing leaves Userplay.
The fields that travel
Userplay creates thirteen fields on your audience, each with aUP_ merge tag. The name is what you see in Mailchimp’s audience settings. The merge tag is what you write in a segment rule or drop into an email.
All thirteen exist on the audience whatever your switches say. What a switch controls is whether Userplay fills the field, so one you turn off stays on the audience and simply stops receiving values.
Profile, from what the player told you.
Activity, from what they have done with your playtests.
Steam, from your tracked apps.
These fields are hidden from your signup forms, so adding them changes nothing your subscribers see.
The two Steam fields read
unknown rather than no when there is no signal. A player who never linked Steam, or who hid their library, has not told you they do not own your game. Segmenting on no finds the people you actually know about.Who decides each value
Some values are yours and some are Mailchimp’s, and the split is fixed.
A field with nothing in it is left alone rather than blanked, so a value you set by hand in Mailchimp survives until Userplay has something real to replace it with.
When a contact changes their email in Mailchimp, Userplay follows the contact to the new address and keeps it attached to the same player. The player’s own Userplay email stays as it was, because the same person can be in several studios’ directories under the address they signed up with.
Unsubscribes are never undone
A contact who unsubscribes, hard-bounces, or is archived in Mailchimp receives no further writes from Userplay. Not a field update, not a tag, not a status. This holds however many syncs run afterwards, and it survives disconnecting and reconnecting. They stay in your player directory the whole time. Opting out of your emails is not leaving your playtest program, so they keep their groups, their history, and their place on any roster.When a change reaches the other side
Outbound changes travel on your plan’s sync schedule. Inbound ones are quicker, because Mailchimp tells us the moment they happen.
The schedule is the whole answer for outbound changes, not a backstop behind something faster. Nothing else carries a contact out to Mailchimp, so a group you change today reaches your audience when the next sync runs and not before. Plan on it rather than around it: you compose a campaign on a human clock, and the sync is paced to match.
Your studio’s cadence is shown on the Tags card in the Mailchimp tab. It runs every 15 days on Essential, every 7 on Starter, and every 3.5 on Studio.
Sync cadence and allowances by plan
The cadence ladder, the on-demand allowance, and what each kind of sync spends.
Syncing on demand
Sync now, in the connection modal, runs a sync straight away when you cannot wait for the next one. Give it a few minutes to finish. Force resync is the heavier repair. An ordinary sync only sends the contacts whose data actually moved, so it often makes no Mailchimp calls at all. A force resync ignores that and re-asserts your entire roster, then re-reads the whole audience.
Both draw on the same monthly allowance, and a force resync spends five times what a plain one does. They exist for the moments that matter rather than for routine use, because running them on a loop simply undoes the cadence.
When a sync keeps failing
A failed sync never counts as a success, so a broken integration keeps being retried rather than quietly looking fresh. The retries slow down as failures pile up, from a couple of hours apart to at most once a week, and the moment one succeeds it goes straight back to your normal cadence. If the connection has genuinely broken, the Mailchimp tab says so. Reconnecting is the repair.Related articles
Groups as tags
The other half of what a contact carries into Mailchimp.
Your Mailchimp audience
The one audience these contacts belong to.
Mailchimp integration
Connecting, pausing, and the way out.
Steam insights
Where the three Steam fields get their values.