This is where the connection pays off: every shopper enriches your audience automatically. Category tags record what they bought; purchase data fields record how much, how often and how recently; shopping scores grade each relationship; and an optional set of last-order fields captures their latest purchase in detail. The audience fields you used to maintain by CSV now maintain themselves. Everything lands on each contact’s profile in Mailchimp and in the segment builder’s field list, ready for segments, automations and campaign copy.
Category tags
A category tag is added to a contact whenever they place an order that includes a product from that category. Tags follow the format cat:<category path>, mirroring the category tree in your store.
Examples:
| Product category | Tag applied |
|---|---|
| Men → Shoes → Running | cat:men/shoes/running |
| Women → Clothing → Dresses | cat:women/clothing/dresses |
| Electronics → Phones | cat:electronics/phones |
The full path is used, not just the leaf category, so cat:men/shoes/running and cat:men/shoes are separate tags. Tags are added automatically and never duplicated.
Tags apply to shoppers with a customer account; guest purchases enrich the purchase data fields (which are email-keyed and cover everyone) but are not tagged.
Turn category tags on or off
Go to Marketing → Intuit Mailchimp → Configuration, open the Customer Tags section, and set Enable Automatic Tags to Yes (the default). Setting it to No stops new category tags from being applied; tags already on contacts in Mailchimp are not removed.
Purchase data fields
Beyond tags, the extension keeps a set of purchase data fields up to date on every contact. These update each time an order syncs, no nightly batch required.
| Field | What it tracks |
|---|---|
| Total spend | Lifetime revenue from this customer (per currency) |
| Average order value | Lifetime average order size (per currency) |
| Order count | Total number of orders, across all currencies |
| Last order date | Date of the customer’s most recent order |
| Top category | The product category they have ordered from most |
| RFM Score | How recently, how often and how much they buy, scored per currency |
| RFM Segment | A readable shopping label computed from that score, such as Champion, ready to segment on directly |
RFM stands for Recency, Frequency, Monetary: the classic measure of how alive a customer relationship is.
If your store accepts more than one currency, total spend and average order value are tracked separately per currency, so a customer who has shopped in both USD and EUR has distinct fields for each.
These fields cover every buyer, keyed by email address. Guest shoppers who never created an account get the same purchase data as registered customers.
Data fields update in real time as orders sync, and the Dashboard shows the sync working. See How sync runs.
Your latest order, directly in your audience (optional)
Four optional fields capture each contact’s most recent order: the order number, the amount, the product SKU and the full category path (the same readable path as your category tags). They live on the contact like any other field, so you can segment on them or drop them straight into campaign copy to reference the exact product a customer just bought. They are off by default so your audience’s merge-field budget stays yours; switch on Sync Last Order Merge Fields in the Contact Sync settings when you want them, and use Rebuild merge fields to fill them for existing contacts.
Map your own fields
Beyond the built-in fields, the Data fields grid in the Contact Sync settings maps any Magento customer attribute to a Mailchimp merge tag of your choice, including dates such as the account creation date. Create the tag in Mailchimp first; it appears in the grid’s dropdown within about fifteen minutes. Mapping is per store view, so each connected store view can carry its own set.
What you can do with it
All of this data becomes available in Mailchimp’s segment builder and Customer Journey triggers. A few practical examples:
- High-value customers: segment on total spend greater than $500 to send a loyalty reward.
- Lapsed buyers: combine last order date more than 90 days ago with order count greater than 1 to re-engage customers who have bought before but gone quiet.
- Category cross-sell: trigger a Customer Journey when the
cat:women/clothingtag is added, then recommend accessories from a complementary category. - First-time buyers: order count equals 1, then send an onboarding sequence.
- Reward your best customers: RFM Segment is Champion, then send VIP early access.
- Personal follow-ups: drop the last order fields into your email copy to reference the exact product a customer just bought.
Start simple. Pick one data field, total spend or order count, and build a single segment. Once that campaign is running, layer in category tags for sharper targeting.
Building the segments and automations themselves happens entirely inside Mailchimp. See Mailchimp’s guides for the how-to:
Questions about tags or fields? Troubleshooting covers the common ones, and ebizmarts support is one email away.