Mailchimp Tags connection
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.
Use cases use-cases
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.
Send emails to contacts for marketing campaigns use-case-send-emails
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.
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 need to gather before working with the Mailchimp Tags destination.
Prerequisites in Experience Platform prerequisites-in-experience-platform
Before activating data to the Mailchimp Tags destination, you must have a schema, a dataset, and audiences created in Experience Platform.
Prerequisites for the Mailchimp Tags destination prerequisites-destination
Note the following prerequisites in order to export data from Platform to your Mailchimp Tags account:
You need to have a Mailchimp account prerequisites-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.
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 Mailchimp account and refer to the Mailchimp documentation on how to generate your API key.
An example of an API key is 0123456789abcdef0123456789abcde-us14.
Identify your 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 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.
Guardrails guardrails
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.
Supported audiences supported-audiences
This section describes which type of audiences you can export to this destination.
Export type and frequency export-type-frequency
Refer to the table below for information about the destination export type and frequency.
- You are exporting all members of an audience, together with the desired schema fields (for example: email address, phone number, last name), according to your field mapping.
- For each audience selected in Platform, the corresponding Mailchimp Tags segment status gets updated with the audience status from Platform.
Connect to the destination connect
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.
Authenticate to destination authenticate
To authenticate to the destination, fill in the required fields below and select Connect to destination.
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.
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.
data center. Refer to the Identify Mailchimp data center section for any guidance.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
- To activate data, you need the View Destinations, Activate Destinations, View Profiles, and View Segments access control permissions. Read the access control overview or contact your product administrator to obtain the required permissions.
- To export identities, you need the View Identity Graph access control permission.
Read Activate audiences to streaming 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 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
Emailidentity namespace.
-
In the Select target field window, choose Select identity namespace and select the
Emailidentity namespace.
The mappings between your XDM profile schema and Mailchimp Tags will be as below:
table 0-row-3 1-row-3 Source Field Target Field Mandatory IdentityMap: EmailIdentity: EmailYes An example with the completed mappings is shown below:
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 > All Contacts page and check if the contacts from the audience have been added and contacts within the audience have been updated with the audience name.
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
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: