Mailchimp

Mailchimp is an all-in-one marketing platform that helps you to run automated email campaigns to manage and engage your clients, customers, and other interested parties.

You can configure Mailchimp as a Target in Activate to curate raw user data from your data warehouse to create personalized marketing campaigns for your most valuable customers and design behavior-based automated journeys to enhance their product experience.

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Prerequisites

• An active Mailchimp account. Read Sign up for an account if you need help creating your Mailchimp account.

• An active user with Admin, Owner, or Manager permission level to authorize Hevo to access your Mailchimp account’s data.

• The Essentials, Standard, or Premium subscription plan in Mailchimp to use the Admin or Manager roles.

• Essential scopes are granted to Activate to access your Mailchimp user’s account.

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Scopes

Activate connects to your Mailchimp account using OAuth and needs certain scopes to access the different Mailchimp API endpoints, to synchronize data with your Mailchimp objects. These scopes are provided when you authorize Hevo to access your Mailchimp account while configuring it as a Target. However, the level of access granted to Hevo depends on the permissions that your account has. Read About Authorized Applications to understand them and the access they provide.

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Configuring Mailchimp as a Target

Perform the following steps to configure Mailchimp as the Target in your Activation:

1. Click Activate in the Navigation Bar.

2. Do one of the following:

   • Select the TARGETS tab in the Targets List View, and click + CREATE TARGET.

     

   • Select the ACTIVATIONS tab in the Activations List View, and click + CREATE ACTIVATION.

     

     1. In the Select Warehouse page, select your Activate Warehouse or click + ADD WAREHOUSE to add a new warehouse. Read Activate Warehouses to configure the selected Warehouse type.

     2. In the Select a Target page, click + ADD TARGET.

        

3. In the Select a Target Type page, click on Mailchimp.

   

4. In the Add the Mailchimp Target page, click + ADD MAILCHIMP ACCOUNT.

   

5. Log in to your Mailchimp account, and click Allow, authorizing Hevo to access your Mailchimp account.

   

6. In the Add the Mailchimp Target page, specify a unique Target Name.

   

7. Click CONTINUE.

   You can view the new Target in the Targets List View. If you are creating an Activation, you return to the Select Data to Synchronize page. Refer to the section, Mapping Fields in Mailchimp to know about field mapping specific to Mailchimp.

   

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Mapping Fields in Mailchimp

An Activation uses the SQL query you provide to synchronize your Warehouse data with the Mailchimp objects. You need to map the query fields in the Field Mapping page for this. Read Map Warehouse fields to Target fields for the steps to do this.

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Data Replication

Activate supports only the Insert New and Update Existing Records (Upsert) behavior, to synchronize data with Mailchimp objects. Read Synchronization Behaviors to know more about this behavior.

Data is synchronized with the supported Mailchimp objects using the Batch API endpoints, which allow the insert and update operations on up to 1000 object records in a single call. If the number of records is less than 1000, the operation is completed in a single call.

Activate synchronizes data from the Warehouse with the supported Mailchimp objects using the following unique identifier:

Unique Identifier	Description
email_address	The email address of a subscriber.

Note: Mailchimp verifies the format of the email address of the records being synchronized and sends a failure message for an incorrect format. As a result, Activate may put records with incorrect or malformed email addresses on hold.

Activate also supports synchronizing data with custom fields in the supported Mailchimp objects. Refer to the section, Identifying Merge Fields to know how to identify these fields.

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Data Model

The following table lists the objects supported by Activate and their unique identifiers:

Object	Unique Identifier	Description
Lists/Audiences > Members	email_address	Stores information about all the members in your mailing lists. Lists, also known as Audience in Mailchimp, are used to store your contacts.

In the Upsert sync behavior, Activate uses the email_address field to update existing records, but in the insert operation, which is to add new records, Mailchimp also requires the status field. Refer to the section, Target Considerations to understand this requirement.

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Identifying Merge Fields

In Mailchimp, you can save custom information about contacts in merge fields, which can be used to personalize campaigns.

Each merge field has a corresponding merge tag and a string of text. For example, a merge field, First Name with the tag *|FNAME|*. In Mailchimp when an audience is created, merge fields with the tags, *|FNAME|*, *|LNAME|*, *|ADDRESS|*, and *|PHONE|* are also created.

You can create merge fields in your Mailchimp audience to match the structure of the data being synchronized from your Warehouse. For example, if your Warehouse data contains a Birthday field and your audience does not, you would need to create that field in your audience. Read Create a merge field for the steps to do this.

While mapping the query fields in the Field Mapping page, Hevo displays the custom fields of the lists/audience in the drop-down list. All the custom fields are displayed with their name and merge tag. For example, if you created a merge field named Birthday with the tag, BIRTHDAY in your audience, it is displayed as Birthday (BIRTHDAY) in the drop-down list in Activate.

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Target Considerations

• Mailchimp uses the status field to identify newly inserted records, and the possible values for this field are:

  • subscribed

  • unsubscribed

  • cleaned

  • pending

  • transactional

  Hence, you should map an appropriate query field to the status field in the Target object while creating an Activation. If this field is not mapped, Activate sets its value to subscribed in the newly inserted records to avoid putting them on hold.

• In Mailchimp, the merge field of type, address is a JSON object with the required keys addr1, city, state, and zip, and the optional keys addr2 and country. While creating an Activation, if you want to synchronize data from your Warehouse with a merge field of this type, you must map the appropriate query fields to all its required keys.

• Mailchimp imposes limits on the number of API requests from the connecting applications to ensure fair usage. Some of these include:

  • Stream Timeouts: A 120-second timeout on API calls.

  • Connections Limit: 10 simultaneous processing requests per user. A task that has timed out but continues to run in Mailchimp reduces the number of available connections.

  • Batch Webhook Events Limit: 500 pending batch webhook events per user. As one batch webhook event is created for every completed batch operation, this limit affects the number of Batch API requests that can be open at any point in time.

  As Activate uses Mailchimp’s Marketing APIs to synchronize data with the supported Mailchimp objects, it is subject to the restrictions imposed by Mailchimp on its API usage. Read Mailchimp API limits.

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