DocumentationExperience PlatformDestinations Guide

Mailchimp Interest Categories connection

Last update: Mon Jan 22 2024 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)

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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. Use this connector to sort your contacts based on their interests and preferences.

Mailchimp Interest Categories uses audiences, groups, and interest categories (also known as group names or group titles). Each Mailchimp group is a list of interest categories. Contacts are associated with an interest category when they subscribe to one or more interest categories through a signup form on your website. Within an audience, you can also organize the contacts into groups and associate them with interest categories, and these can then be used to create segments. You can use these audiences to broadcast targeted campaign emails to the subscribed contacts.

This Adobe Experience Platform destination uses the Mailchimp batch subscribe or unsubscribe API API to create interest categories and then add contacts from each of the selected Platform audiences into a corresponding interest category. You can add new contacts or update the information of existing Mailchimp contacts, then add or remove them from their desired groups within an existing Mailchimp audience after activating them within a new segment. Mailchimp Interest Groups uses the selected audience names from Platform as interest categories within Mailchimp.

Use cases use-cases

To help you better understand how and when you should use the Mailchimp Interest Categories destination, here is a sample use case that Adobe Experience Platform customers can solve by using this destination.

Send emails to contacts for marketing campaigns use-case-send-emails

The sales department of a sport goods website wants to broadcast an email-based marketing campaign to a list of contacts who have self-identified themselves as being interested in soccer. The lists of contacts are segregated as batches in the data export received from the development team of the website 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 Interest Categories, if any contacts do not exist in the selected Mailchimp audience they get added to a group with the audience name that the contact belongs to. If any contacts already exist in the Mailchimp audience or group, then their information is updated. Once the data is sent over to Mailchimp Interest Categories, the Sales team can select and send the marketing campaign email to the soccer interest group within the Mailchimp audience.

Prerequisites prerequisites

Refer to the sections below for any prerequisites that you need to set up in Experience Platform and Mailchimp and for information that you must gather before working with the Mailchimp Interest Categories destination.

Prerequisites in Experience Platform prerequisites-in-experience-platform

Before activating data to the Mailchimp Interest Categories destination, you must have a schema, a dataset, and segments created in Experience Platform.

Prerequisites for the Mailchimp Interest Categories destination prerequisites-destination

Note the following prerequisites in order to export data from Platform to your Mailchimp account:

You must have a Mailchimp account prerequisites-account

Before you can create a Mailchimp Interest Categories 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.

Gather Mailchimp API key gather-credentials

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 account and refer to the Mailchimp Generate your API key documentation to create one.

An example of an API key is 0123456789abcdef0123456789abcde-us14.

IMPORTANT
If you generate the API key, write it down as you will not be able to access it after generation.

Identify Mailchimp data center identify-data-center

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 value is the first part of the URL you see in your browser. If the URL is https://us14.mailchimp.com/account/api/, then the data center is us14.

It’s also appended to your API key in the form key-dc; if your API key is 0123456789abcdef0123456789abcde-us14, then the data center is us14.

Write down the data center value (us14 in this example), you need this value when you fill in destination details.

If you require further guidance, refer to the Mailchimp Fundamentals documentation.

Guardrails guardrails

Each of your Mailchimp audiences can contain up to 60 group names (or interest categories) in a single group or across several groups within the same audience. Refer to Mailchimp groups for any clarifications required. When you reach this limit, you get a 400 BAD_REQUEST Cannot have more than 60 interests per list (Across all categories) message as an error response from the Mailchimp API.

Additionally, refer to the Mailchimp rate limits for detailed information about the limits imposed by the Mailchimp API.

Supported identities supported-identities

Mailchimp supports the activation of identities described in the table below. Learn more about identities.

Target Identity
Description
Considerations
Email
Contact email Address
Mandatory

Export type and frequency export-type-frequency

Refer to the table below for information about the destination export type and frequency.

Item
Type
Notes
Export type
Profile-based
  • You are exporting all members of a segment, together with the desired schema fields (for example: email address, phone number, last name), according to your field mapping.
  • For each selected audience in Platform, the corresponding Mailchimp Interest Categories segment status gets updated with its audience status from Platform.
Export frequency
Streaming
Streaming destinations are “always on” API-based connections. When 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.

Connect to the destination connect

IMPORTANT
To connect to the destination, you need the View Destinations and Manage Destinations access control permissions. 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 Interest Categories. Alternatively, you can locate it under the Email marketing category.

Authenticate to destination authenticate

To authenticate to the destination, fill in the required fields below and select Connect to destination.

Field
Description
Username
Your Mailchimp Interest Categories 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.

Platform UI screenshot showing how to authenticate.

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.

Fill in destination details destination-details

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.

Platform UI screenshot showing the destination details.

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 select Data center first)
After you select 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.
Interest Category (Please select Data center and Audience Name first)
After you select your Audience Name, this dropdown is automatically populated with the interest group category names from your Mailchimp account. Select the category name that you want to update with data from Platform.
TIP
If the API key you provided in the Password field or the Data center value are incorrect, the UI displays a Mailchimp API error response: No options are available. Please verify the values selected for the following dependent fields: dataCenter as shown below. In this case, you are not be able to select a value from the Audience Name (Please select Data center first) field. To fix this error, provide the correct values.

Enable alerts enable-alerts

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.

Activate audiences to this destination activate

IMPORTANT

Read Activate profiles and audiences to streaming audience export destinations for instructions on activating audiences to this destination.

Mapping considerations and example mapping-considerations-example

To correctly send your audience data from Adobe Experience Platform to the Mailchimp Interest Categories destination, you must 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 Interest Categories destination fields, follow the steps below:

  1. In the Mapping step, select Add new mapping. You can now see a new mapping row on the screen.

  2. In the Select source field window, choose the Select attributes category and select the XDM attribute or choose the Select identity namespace and select an identity.

  3. In the Select target field window, choose the Select identity namespace and select an identity or choose Select attributes category and select from the list of attributes populated from the Mailchimp API. Any custom attributes that you have added to the selected Mailchimp Audience will also be available for selection as target fields.

    The mappings available between your XDM profile schema and Mailchimp Interest Categories are as below:

    table 0-row-3 1-row-3 2-row-3 3-row-3 4-row-3
    Source Field Target Field Notes
    IdentityMap: Email Identity: email Mandatory: Yes
    xdm: person.name.firstName Attribute: FNAME
    xdm: person.name.lastName Attribute: LNAME
    xdm: person.birthDayAndMonth Attribute: BIRTHDAY

    Additionally, ADDRESS is a special target field known as a merge field within your Mailchimp audience. The Mailchimp documentation defines the required keys as addr1, city, state, and zip, and the optional keys addr2 and country. The values for these fields must be strings. If any of the ADDRESS field mappings are present, the destination passes the ADDRESS object to the Mailchimp API for update. Any ADDRESS fields that are not mapped has its value default to NULL except for country which defaults to US.

    The mappings available for the ADDRESS field are as below:

    table 0-row-2 1-row-2 2-row-2 3-row-2 4-row-2 5-row-2 6-row-2
    Source Field Target Field
    xdm: workAddress.street1 Attribute: ADDRESS.addr1
    xdm: workAddress.street2 Attribute: ADDRESS.addr2
    xdm: workAddress.city Attribute: ADDRESS.city
    xdm: workAddress.state Attribute: ADDRESS.state
    xdm: workAddress.postalCode Attribute: ADDRESS.zip
    xdm: workAddress.country Attribute: ADDRESS.country

    For example, you want to update the value for country with the contact’s existing address field addr1, city, state, and zip values as 132, My Street, Kingston, New York, New York and 12401. To update the country you must pass the existing values with changes (if any) and the new value for country. So the values in your dataset should be 132, My Street, Kingston, New York, New York, 12401, and US. To reiterate, if you only pass country and do not provide values for addr1, city, state, and zip they will be overwritten by NULL.

    An example with the completed mappings is shown below:
    Platform UI screenshot example showing field mappings.

When you have finished providing the mappings for your destination connection, select Next.

Validate data export exported-data

To validate that you have correctly set up the destination, follow the steps below:

  • Log in to your Mailchimp account. Then, navigate to the Audience page. Next, expand the Manage Contacts menu and select Groups.

Mailchimp UI screenshot showing the Audience group page.

  • Select the Group and check if the selected audiences are created as categories with the audience name from Platform, which may be followed by an automatically generated suffix.
    • This destination uses the selected segments’ names to create the interest category by using the Mailchimp Add interest category API. If you create a new destination and activate the same audiences again, Mailchimp adds a suffix to distinguish between the existing and the new segments.
  • Contacts whose emails did not exist in the group are added to the newly created category.
  • For contacts that already exist within the group, the attribute field data is updated, and the contact added to the newly created category.

Mailchimp UI screenshot showing the Audience group categories.

Data usage and governance data-usage-governance

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.

Errors and troubleshooting errors-and-troubleshooting

Error encountered if Mailchimp API key or data center values are incorrect incorrect-credentials-error

If the API key you provided in the Password field or the Data center value are incorrect, the UI displays a Mailchimp API error response: No options are available. Please verify the values selected for the following dependent fields: dataCenter as shown below. In this case, you are not able to select a value from the Audience Name (Please select Data center first) field.

Platform UI screenshot showing error if your Mailchimp API key or data center values are incorrect.

To fix this error and proceed to the next step, you must provide the correct values. Refer to the Identify Mailchimp data center and
Gather Mailchimp API key sections if you need guidance.

Error encountered if Mailchimp group name limit is exceeded group-name-limits-error

When creating the destination, you might receive the following error messages: Cannot have more than 60 interests per list (Across all categories) or 400 BAD_REQUEST. This happens when you exceed the 60 group names (or interest categories) in a single group or across several groups within the same audience limit, as described in the guardrails section. To fix this error, make sure you are not exceeding the group name limit in Mailchimp.

Mailchimp Status and Error codes

Refer to the Mailchimp errors page for a comprehensive list of status and error codes with explanations.

Additional resources additional-resources

Additional useful information from the Mailchimp documentation is below:

recommendation-more-help
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