Mailchimp is a popular email marketing automation platform used worldwide by thousands of businesses. Built specially for eCommerce and retail, Mailchimp allows you to build your audience and send them personalized campaign and marketing messages through web or mobile.

RudderStack supports Mailchimp as a destination to which you can seamlessly send your event data. Also, you can add people to your Mailchimp list via a simple identify call.

Getting started

Before configuring Mailchimp as a destination in RudderStack, verify if the source platform is supported by Mailchimp by referring to the table below:

Once you have confirmed that the source platform supports sending events to Mailchimp, follow these steps:

1. From your RudderStack dashboard, add a source. Then, from the list of destinations, select Mailchimp.
2. Assign a name to the destination and click Continue.

Connection settings

To successfully configure Mailchimp as a destination, you will need to configure the following settings:

• Mailchimp API Key: Enter your Mailchimp API Key.

• Mailchimp Audience ID: Enter your Mailchimp Audience ID.
• Mailchimp DataCenter ID: Enter your Mailchimp DataCenter ID.
• Enable Merge fields: Enable this setting if you want to add merge fields while updating a subscriber.

Identify

The identify call captures the details about the visiting user along with the properties associated with that user.

Adding or updating a user

A sample identify call is shown below:

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rudderanalytics.identify("1hKOmRA4el9Zt1WSfVJIVo4GRlm", {
    firstName: "Alex",
    lastName: "Keener",
    email: "alex@example.com"
});

Every time an identify call is made including an email address, RudderStack performs the following steps:

• RudderStack first checks with Mailchimp whether that specific email address exists for the listId provided in the destination settings.
• If the email address does not exist in the list, RudderStack subscribes the associated user to the list immediately. If the doubleOptIn setting is enabled, Mailchimp sends a confirmation email to that user, and that email is tagged with a pending subscriber status. The subscriber status automatically changes to subscribed once the user confirms the email.
• If the user already has a subscriber status such as pending, subscribed, unsubscribed or cleaned, RudderStack will not resubscribe them, but only update their associated user traits.

Capture custom user traits

You can capture the custom user traits in the Mailchimp list dashboard by creating a custom merge field in Mailchimp.

Creating custom merge fields

To create and send custom merge fields or user traits to Mailchimp, please follow these steps:

• Create the merge field in Mailchimp for every trait you want sent to it.
• When you make the identify call, the keys that match the traits above will automatically appear in your Mailchimp list.

Overriding listId

If you have multiple lists that your users can subscribe to, you can override the default listId as a parameter to Mailchimp.

The following sample snippet overrides the default listId with esf1rd234a as listId:

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rudderanalytics.identify(
  "1hKOmRA4el9Zt1WSfVJIVo4GRlm",
  {
    email: "alex@example.com"
  },
  {
    integrations: {
      MailChimp: {
        listId: "esf1rd234a"
      }
    }
  }
);

Updating the subscription status

RudderStack provides you with the option to manually update the subscription status of a user by passing the subscriptionStatus parameter to Mailchimp.

An example is shown below:

Copy
rudderanalytics.identify(
  "1hKOmRA4el9Zt1WSfVJIVo4GRlm",
  {
    email: "alex@example.com"
  },
  {
    integrations: {
      MailChimp: {
        subscriptionStatus: "unsubscribed"
      }
    }
  }
);

FAQ

Where do I get the Mailchimp API Key?

To get the Mailchimp API Key, log in to Mailchimp, and go to Account > Extras > API Keys.

Where do I get the Mailchimp Audience ID?

You can find the Mailchimp Audience ID by logging in to Mailchimp and navigating to Audience > Manage Audience > Settings > Audience name and defaults.

Where do I get the Mailchimp DataCenter ID?

To get the DataCenter ID, please refer to your Mailchimp URL in the browser. For example, if the URL is https://us20.admin.mailchimp.com/lists, the DataCenter ID is us20 in this case.