Mailchimp event forwarding extension overview
The Mailchimp event forwarding extension sends events to the Mailchimp Marketing API that can trigger emails for Mailchimp marketing campaigns, journeys, or transactions.
This document covers how to set up the extension and configure rules using the Add Event action.
Prerequisites
This document assumes that you are familiar with the relevant Mailchimp products leveraged by the extension. For more information, please see the Mailchimp help documentation for campaigns, journeys, and transactions.
A Mailchimp account is required to use this extension. You can sign up for an account here. In the Mailchimp account dashboard, make note of the following values for use in this guide:
- Your Mailchimp domain prefix
- Your API key
- The Audience ID
- The default “from” email address
Depending on your Mailchimp account plan, you may have limited access to Mailchimp Customer Journey tools.
Domain prefix
After logging in to Mailchimp and landing on the Dashboard view, the address bar of your browser should display a URL like https://us11.admin.mailchimp.com
or just us11.admin.mailchimp.com
. In this example, the prefix us11
is just a placeholder and your value will be different. Record your URL with your prefix for a later step.
API key
To find the API key for your account, select your profile icon in the Mailchimp UI, then select Profile. You should see a URL like https://us11.admin.mailchimp.com/account/profile/
but with your prefix instead of us11
.
Select Extras, then API keys:
Under Your API keys, you can choose an existing key or you an select Create A Key to create a new one. You can create a new key to use specifically with this extension. Copy the API key and save it for a later step. For more details, see the Mailchimp documentation on how to generate your API key.
Audience ID and From address
Select Audience in the left navigation, then Audience dashboard. Next, select the audience you intend to use with this extension. To learn more, see the Mailchimp document on creating an audience.
With your audience created and selected, select the Manage Audience dropdown and choose Settings. This screen shows various settings for your audience.
At the bottom of the Settings screen, you should see Unique id for audience [audience name]
where [audience name]
is the name of your actual audience. Copy the Audience ID and save it for a later step.
Select Audience name and defaults and confirm that Default From email address has the correct value for your campaigns. Note that the Audience ID is also listed at the top of this page and is same value you copied down in the last step.
Mailchimp automations
Depending on your Mailchimp plan and whether you use transactional emails, Customer Journeys, or other Mailchimp automations, your specific journey settings may vary.
Installation and configuration
This section lists the steps to install and configure the extension. To securely save the Mailchimp API key, you must use event forwarding secrets.
Create a secret and data element
In an event forwarding property, create a Token secret called Mailchimp API Key
.
Next, create a data element using the Core extension and a Secret data element type to reference the Mailchimp API Key
secret you just created. Enter Mailchimp Token
as the data element name.
Install and configure the extension
In the same event forwarding property, select Extensions, then Catalog to display the extensions available for installation. From here, search for the Mailchimp extension and select Install.
The configuration screen appears. Under Mailchimp Server Prefix Domain Name, enter the domain you copied earlier from your Mailchimp account, including your unique domain prefix.
http://
or https://
in this field.
Under Mailchimp token, select the data element icon and choose the Mailchimp Token
data element you created earlier. Select Save to save the changes.
The extension is now installed and configured for use in your property.
Data collection
When using this extension in a rule, there are several data values that the extension sends to Mailchimp with each event. For a typical implementation, you can configure the Adobe Experience Platform Web SDK extension to send that data to Platform Edge Network for use by the extension in the event forwarding property.
The data required by this extension can be sent from Web SDK as either XDM data (using the xdm
object) or non-XDM data (using the data
object).
For example, if a customer makes a purchase or registers for an event on your site, you could send a confirmation email through Mailchimp with this extension. Once you send the required information from Web SDK to the Edge Network, the extension triggers the email with Mailchimp.
Data elements
The screenshot in the previous section shows the data that you can send with each event from this extension to Mailchimp. Once you configure Web SDK to send this data to the Edge Network, you can create data elements in the event forwarding property so the extension can access those values.
The table below provides more detail for each possible value.
email
arc.event.xdm._tenant.emailId
or
arc.event.data._tenant.emailId
listId
arc.event.xdm._tenant.listId
or
arc.event.data._tenant.listid
name
arc.event.xdm._tenant.name
or
arc.event.data._tenant.name
properties
arc.event.xdm._tenant.properties
or
arc.event.data._tenant.properties
isSyncing
arc.event.xdm._tenant.isSyncing
or
arc.event.data._tenant.isSyncing
is_syncing
set to true
will not trigger automationsoccurredAt
arc.event.xdm._tenant.occuredAt
or
arc.event.data._tenant.occuredAt
In your event forwarding property, you can create a data element for each of the fields outlined above. Once created, you can reference the data elements in the Add Event action of this extension.
You can now use this extension and the Add Event action to trigger Mailchimp emails for your audiences.
Data validation
When working with event forwarding extensions, the Adobe Experience Platform Debugger is very useful. In the Logs section, under Edge logs you can see the requests made by your event forwarding rules after they are triggered. The following screenshots shows a request being made to the Mailchimp API by the extension.
In the Mailchimp dashboard, on the Activity Feed view of your Audience or Audience Member, a list of events for that Audience or Audience Member is provided. This should match the events sent by the extension and show any optional data sent, along with the email or campaign they received. See the Mailchimp Automation help guides for more details.