How it works

Choose your audience

Pick the Mailchimp audience your store's contacts and orders sync into.

Your audience is your Mailchimp contact list: the people. Every subscriber, customer, tag and campaign lives inside it. It may be years of collected signups and engagement, which makes it the most valuable thing the extension touches, and the one thing it treats as untouchable.

Audience vs. Mailchimp store

These two get mixed up constantly, so it’s worth being clear:

An audience holds the people: contacts, segments, tags, campaigns.
A Mailchimp store holds the shopping data (products, orders, carts) that makes your campaigns smarter. Each store belongs to a single audience.

In short: your store view feeds a Mailchimp store, and that store lives inside an audience:

Magento store view → Mailchimp store → Audience

The two matter very differently. Your audience can be years in the making and is irreplaceable. A Mailchimp store is working data: your products, orders and carts already live in Magento, so the extension can rebuild a Mailchimp store from scratch whenever needed. If one ever has to be replaced, the cost is a few minutes of Backfill, not data. Magento remains the source of record for everything a Mailchimp store holds; your audience has no such backup, which is exactly why the extension never touches it destructively.

One audience is usually all you need

Mailchimp recommends keeping everyone in a single audience and splitting them with tags or segments, not multiple audiences. If you only have one, Mailchimp simply calls it “All contacts.” Nothing is missing.

Your audience is the valuable part. We treat it that way.

Your audience may be the most valuable asset your marketing owns: years of signups, consent history, engagement. The extension is built around one rule: it adds and updates, it never takes away.

Bring the audience you already have. Connecting adds shopping data to it and changes nothing else: nobody is subscribed, unsubscribed or deleted, and your signup history stays exactly as it is.
Nobody is ever demoted. A subscribed contact stays subscribed. Syncs and re-syncs never downgrade a status, and anyone who unsubscribed in Mailchimp stays unsubscribed: every catch-up sync respects their choice.
Deleting is archiving. If you ever delete a customer or subscriber in Magento, the Mailchimp contact is archived: reversible, off your bill, never erased.

That is why picking an audience here is safe, whether it is brand new or ten years old.

See or change which audience you’re using

To check, open Marketing → Intuit Mailchimp → Configuration at the store-view scope: the header shows your connection, and opening it reveals the full details, account, Mailchimp store, audience and sync dates.

To change audiences, disconnect the store view and reconnect it toward the audience you want. This is a safe move by design, thanks to that same asymmetry: your contacts are never touched, and the shopping data is simply rebuilt. Reconnecting picks a fresh Mailchimp store or creates one, and Backfill refills it from Magento, minutes on most stores. A Mailchimp store that already holds another store’s shopping data cannot be reused; that protects its owner the same way yours is protected.

Running several store views?

You can point them all at the same audience (contacts unified, shopping data kept per store) or give each its own. Both work; the multi-store guide covers which to choose.