Connecting Campaign Monitor lets Rhythm send contact lists to your Campaign Monitor account for email marketing. Use this setup to approve Rhythm in Campaign Monitor, save the connection, and choose the Campaign Monitor client that receives your lists.
What It Controls
A Campaign Monitor connection controls:
- The Campaign Monitor account you approve Rhythm to use.
- The name you give the connection so you can recognize it.
- The client inside that Campaign Monitor account that Rhythm uses.
Prerequisites
- You have a Campaign Monitor login that can approve applications for the account you want to connect.
- You know which client inside that Campaign Monitor account Rhythm should use, if the account has more than one.
Connect Campaign Monitor
- Go to System & Security › Integrations › Campaign Monitor.
- Choose Create Campaign Monitor Account. Rhythm shows this button only when your Rhythm account does not already have a Campaign Monitor connection.
- Campaign Monitor opens. Sign in and approve Rhythm's access if prompted.
- When you return to Rhythm, enter a Name for the connection.
- Choose Save Changes.
- Choose the client this connection should use, then choose Save Changes again.
Result
Rhythm saves the connection with the client you chose. In the connection list, the client appears as its identifier instead of its name, which can make it hard to recognize when the Campaign Monitor account has several clients with similar names.
Warning
The client-selection step works only when you arrive from the previous step, because it uses information carried over from that step. If you refresh the page, navigate away, or open the page directly by address, edit the connection again from the list to restart the flow.
Why Editing Sends You Back to Campaign Monitor
Every time you edit an existing Campaign Monitor connection, Rhythm sends you to Campaign Monitor for approval first, even when you only want to rename it. You cannot open the connection form directly without completing that round trip.
Tip
If you approve with a different Campaign Monitor login while editing, Rhythm re-points the connection to that different account without a separate warning. The client you chose before still belongs to the old account, so if you only meant to rename the connection, approve with the same Campaign Monitor login you used originally.
Editing a connection also makes it active again if it had been paused, whether or not you meant to resume it.
Choosing a Client Later
To change which client a connection uses after you first save it, edit the connection. Editing requires the Campaign Monitor approval round trip described above, and saving that edit takes you back to the client-selection step, just like the first time.
Warning
If your Rhythm account has more than one Campaign Monitor connection, the client list you see is not guaranteed to come from the connection you are editing. It can come from any Campaign Monitor connection in your Rhythm account, so if the clients look unfamiliar for the account you are working on, keep that in mind before choosing one.
Rhythm does not check that the client you choose belongs to the Campaign Monitor account you just approved, so any client identifier can be saved. Choose carefully from the list instead of assuming the first option is correct.
Sending Contact Lists and Fields to Campaign Monitor
Once Campaign Monitor is connected, you send contact lists to it by integrating a Rhythm query. A query is eligible only if it returns contact information, especially an email address. A query that does not return contact information, such as one built only from chapters or other non-contact records, cannot be used this way. When a query spans more than one kind of record, such as contacts together with their memberships, the fields it returns reach Campaign Monitor as custom fields on the subscriber record.
For each subscriber, Rhythm uses the most human-readable name it has for that person. If no name is available, it uses the subscriber's email address instead.
Tip
A newly integrated list can appear in Campaign Monitor before it has any subscribers. The first sync after you integrate a query can take about an hour, and Rhythm resyncs the list roughly every hour after that. If a list looks empty right after you set it up, check back rather than assuming the integration failed.
Warning
The fields Rhythm's sync creates in Campaign Monitor are not redefined in place if you change a field's type afterward. The sync only checks for new fields and creates the ones it does not find yet. If a field's type in Campaign Monitor needs to be corrected, delete the list in Campaign Monitor and let Rhythm's next sync recreate it, which rebuilds the fields with the corrected type.
Date fields sent to Campaign Monitor are recognized there as values, so you can use Campaign Monitor's own greater-than and less-than comparisons on them in a journey. This was not always the case: Rhythm's export once sent dates in a form Campaign Monitor read as text, which blocked that kind of comparison, and that behavior has since changed. Field names reach Campaign Monitor exactly as they exist in Rhythm, without being reformatted, which avoids collisions between similarly named fields from different record types.
If you want a value to control segmentation or personalization in Campaign Monitor, add the corresponding field to the query you send instead of creating or editing that field directly in Campaign Monitor. A later Rhythm sync can overwrite a field that exists only in Campaign Monitor, so anything you need to keep should come from your Rhythm query instead.
Permissions
Any signed-in staff member of your Rhythm account can connect, edit, and remove a Campaign Monitor connection. There is no separate permission for this page; whether you can continue depends on whether you can sign in and approve access at Campaign Monitor.
Validation and Errors
| Situation | What you see |
|---|---|
| Name is left blank when saving the connection | The save is blocked until you enter a name |
| The Campaign Monitor approval code has expired or was already used | The save fails with a server error, shown as "Unable to save campaign monitor account" |
| The client list fails to load | "Unable to load Campaign Monitor client list" |
| Saving your chosen client fails | "Unable to update campaign monitor account id" |
| The connection list fails to load | "Unable to load Campaign Monitor Accounts" |
If a save fails because your approval code expired or was already used, start the connect or edit flow again from the beginning instead of retrying the same form.