First sync failed to subscribe customers

@tmcguire thanks for reaching out. This is a little bit more complicated than it may seem, so let me explain why our plugin does what it does.

Wordpress / WooCommerce does not have a “subscribe to my newsletter” type of setting at the user level, and because of that, we don’t know who wanted to be on your list BEFORE the store owner starts using the plugin. We have to ask the store owner whether or not we should auto subscribe them in our settings during the initial “historical sync” process because we don’t have any other option.

Moving forward, the checkbox will set the value of mailchimp_woocommerce_is_subscribed to true or false based on what the user checks on the registration or order checkout screens. This will attach a proper newsletter status to your user base and allows us to push that subscription status to Mailchimp for you.

You do have the option to update the user meta yourself if you know for sure that a particular user should be on your mailing list. To do that, you would simply change the value of mailchimp_woocommerce_is_subscribed to the value of 1 and then save the user profile. You should see that person in Mailchimp very shortly after that.

A force sync will honor this user meta if that helps, but by the time you updated these user accounts, that would have also pushed the data into Mailchimp for you, removing the need to do the force resync.

I hope this helps understand the complication we face before the store owner has been using the plugin for an extended period of time. I’ll be glad to continue doing questions and answers with you to help solve your issue, feel free to reach back out.

Yes, this makes sense as you explained it. However, I think having the checkbox stating that the customers will be auto subscribed on sync is a bit misleading. Maybe re-wording it’s purpose will give some clarity in the future.

Great tip on updating the meta on the customers to reflect their subscription status however!

@ryanhungate I had this exact same issue, and this is great advice, but my situation would require me to write 30k+ user meta entries, which I’d rather avoid if possible.

Would it be possible to “export” the audience that was sync’d via the plugin from Mailchimp.com, delete those contacts, then re-import them as “subscribed”? I included a unique subscriber tag during the initial sync, so targeting those folks on Mailchimp.com is easy. Additionally, I now have to plugin properly setup, and it’s working great, so this would be a “one time” action. I’m not entirely sure how the plugin tracks what has/hasn’t been synced though, so my fear is that doing this will simply re-trigger some massive sync that ends up overriding all the newly imported “subscribers” anyway.

Any advice to subscribe a large number of folks flagged as “transactional” without making massive database changes would be much appreciated. Cheers!