Mailchimp (also known as Intuit Mailchimp) is a popular marketing automation platform and email marketing service used by businesses to manage and talk to contacts (clients, customers, or other interested parties) using mailing lists and email marketing campaigns.
Mailchimp Tags uses audiences and tags to manage your contact information. Tags are labels using which you can organize your contacts and label them for your internal categorization within Mailchimp.
Compared to Mailchimp Interest Categories which you would use to sort your contacts based on their interests and preferences, Mailchimp Tags is meant to manage subscriptions to topics of interest that your contacts might be interested in. Note, Experience Platform also has a connection for Mailchimp Interest Categories, you can check it out on the Mailchimp Interest Categories page.
This Adobe Experience Platform destination leverages the Mailchimp batch subscribe or unsubscribe API endpoint. You can add new contacts or update tags of existing Mailchimp contacts within an existing Mailchimp audience after activating them within a new audience. Mailchimp Tags uses the selected audience names from Platform as the tag names within Mailchimp.
To help you better understand how and when you should use the Mailchimp Tags destination, here is a sample use case that Adobe Experience Platform customers can solve by using this destination.
The sales department of an organization wants to broadcast an email based marketing campaign to a curated list of contacts. The contact lists are received in batches from different offline sources and therefore need to be tracked. The team identifies an existing Mailchimp audience and starts building the Experience Platform audiences into which the contacts from each list are added. After sending these audiences to Mailchimp Tags, if any contacts do not exist in the selected Mailchimp audience, they get added with an associated tag which includes the audience name the contact belongs to. If any contacts already exist in the Mailchimp audience a new tag with the name of the audience is added. As the labels are visible in Mailchimp the offline sources are easily identifiable. After the data is sent over to Mailchimp they send the marketing campaign email to the audience.
Refer to the sections below for any prerequisites that you need to set up in Experience Platform and Mailchimp and for information that you need to gather before working with the Mailchimp Tags destination.
Before activating data to the Mailchimp Tags destination, you must have a schema, a dataset, and audiences created in Experience Platform.
Note the following prerequisites in order to export data from Platform to your Mailchimp Tags account:
Before you can create a Mailchimp Tags destination, you must first ensure that you have a Mailchimp account. If you do not have one already visit the Mailchimp signup page to register and create your account.
You need your Mailchimp API key to authenticate the Mailchimp Interest Categories destination against your Mailchimp account. The API key serves as the Password when you authenticate the destination.
If you do not have your API key, sign in to your Mailchimp account and refer to the Mailchimp documentation on how to generate your API key.
An example of an API key is 0123456789abcdef0123456789abcde-us14
.
If you generate the API key, write it down as you will not be able to access it after generation.
Next, you must identify your Mailchimp data center. To do this, log in to your Mailchimp account and navigate to the API keys section of your account.
The data center ID is the first section of the URL you see in your browser. If the URL is https://us14
.mailchimp.com/account/api/, then the data center is us14
.
The data center ID is also appended to your API key in the form key-dc; For example, if your API key is 0123456789abcdef0123456789abcde-us14
, then the data center is us14
.
Write down the data center value (us14
in this example). You will need this value when you fill in the destination details.
If you require further guidance, refer to the Mailchimp Fundamentals documentation.
Refer to the Mailchimp rate limits for detailed information about the limits imposed by the Mailchimp API.
Mailchimp supports the activation of identities described in the table below. Learn more about identities.
Target Identity | Description | Considerations |
---|---|---|
The email address of the contact. | Mandatory |
This section describes which type of audiences you can export to this destination.
Audience origin | Supported | Description |
---|---|---|
Segmentation Service | ✓ | Audiences generated through the Experience Platform Segmentation Service. |
Custom uploads | ✓ | Audiences imported into Experience Platform from CSV files. |
Refer to the table below for information about the destination export type and frequency.
Item | Type | Notes |
---|---|---|
Export type | Profile-based |
|
Export frequency | Streaming | Streaming destinations are “always on” API-based connections. As soon as a profile is updated in Experience Platform based on audience evaluation, the connector sends the update downstream to the destination platform. Read more about streaming destinations. |
To connect to the destination, you need the Manage Destinations access control permission. Read the access control overview or contact your product administrator to obtain the required permissions.
To connect to this destination, follow the steps described in the destination configuration tutorial. In the configure destination workflow, fill in the fields listed in the two sections below.
Within Destinations > Catalog, search for Mailchimp Tags. Alternatively you can locate it under the Email marketing category.
To authenticate to the destination, fill in the required fields below and select Connect to destination.
Field | Description |
---|---|
Username | Your Mailchimp username. |
Password | Your Mailchimp API key, which you had noted down in the Gather Mailchimp credentials section. Your API key takes the form of {KEY}-{DC} , where the {KEY} portion refers to the value noted down in the Mailchimp API key section and the {DC} portion refers to the Mailchimp data center. You can provide either the {KEY} portion or the entire form.For example, if your API key is 0123456789abcdef0123456789abcde-us14 ,you could provide either 0123456789abcdef0123456789abcde or 0123456789abcdef0123456789abcde-us14 as the value. |
If the details provided are valid, the UI displays a Connected status with a green check mark. You can then proceed to the next step.
To configure details for the destination, fill in the required and optional fields below. An asterisk next to a field in the UI indicates that the field is required.
Field | Description |
---|---|
Name | A name by which you will recognize this destination in the future. |
Description | A description that will help you identify this destination in the future. |
Data center | Your Mailchimp account data center . Refer to the Identify Mailchimp data center section for any guidance. |
Audience Name (Please enter Data center first) | After you enter your Data center, this dropdown is automatically populated with the audience names from your Mailchimp account. Select the audience that you want to update with data from Platform. |
You can enable alerts to receive notifications on the status of the dataflow to your destination. Select an alert from the list to subscribe to receive notifications on the status of your dataflow. For more information on alerts, see the guide on subscribing to destinations alerts using the UI.
When you are finished providing details for your destination connection, select Next.
Read Activate audiences to streaming destinations for instructions on activating audiences to this destination.
To correctly send your audience data from Adobe Experience Platform to the Mailchimp Tags destination, you need to go through the field mapping step. Mapping consists of creating a link between your Experience Data Model (XDM) schema fields in your Platform account and their corresponding equivalents from the target destination.
To correctly map your XDM fields to the Mailchimp Tags destination fields, follow the steps below:
In the Mapping step, select Add new mapping. You will see a new mapping row on the screen.
In the Select source field window, choose Select identity namespace and select the Email
identity namespace.
In the Select target field window, choose Select identity namespace and select the Email
identity namespace.
The mappings between your XDM profile schema and Mailchimp Tags will be as below:
Source Field | Target Field | Mandatory |
---|---|---|
IdentityMap: Email |
Identity: Email |
Yes |
An example with the completed mappings is shown below:
When you have finished providing the mappings for your destination connection, select Next.
To validate that you have correctly set up the destination, follow the steps below:
All Adobe Experience Platform destinations are compliant with data usage policies when handling your data. For detailed information on how Adobe Experience Platform enforces data governance, see the Data Governance overview.
Refer to the Mailchimp errors page for a comprehensive list of status and error codes with explanations.
Additional useful information from the Mailchimp documentation is below: