Integrations
Mailchimp
Add people who convert to a Mailchimp audience, tagged with the event and the short link, with a timeline event.
The Mailchimp integration adds the person behind an approved conversion to your Mailchimp audience, tags them with the kind of conversion and the short link that brought them, and records a custom event on their profile timeline. Clicks are not sent: a click has no email address. Available on Growth and Ultimate.
What you need
- A Mailchimp API key (Profile → Extras → API keys → Create A Key). It ends in your data centre, for example
-us21. - The audience ID (Audience → All contacts → Settings → Audience name and defaults).
- Conversions that include an
email. Conversions without one are skipped.
Connect it to Letlink
- Open Integrations → Mailchimp. Owners and admins only.
- Paste the API key and the audience ID.
- Choose how new contacts are added: double opt-in (the default — Mailchimp emails them a confirmation and they stay pending until they confirm), subscribe directly (only if you already have their consent), or transactional (on the audience, but not marketable).
- Optionally change the tag prefix (default
letlink), then save.
What we send
One request per conversion to Mailchimp's batch endpoint (POST https://<dc>.api.mailchimp.com/3.0/batches) with three operations on the member, addressed by the MD5 hash of the lower-cased email:
| Operation | What it does |
|---|---|
PUT /lists/<audience>/members/<hash> |
Adds the person with your chosen status, or updates them if they already exist. Existing members keep their status. |
POST …/members/<hash>/tags |
Adds the tags <prefix>-<event> (sale, lead, signup or your custom event name) and <prefix>-<short code>. |
POST …/members/<hash>/events |
Records the event <prefix>_<event> with short_code, value, currency and order_id as properties. |
Use the tags to build segments — everyone who bought through spring-sale, say — and the event to trigger a Customer Journey.
Nothing is arriving — what should I check?
- Mailchimp accepts batches immediately and runs them in the background, so an error in one operation (an invalid or previously unsubscribed address, for example) is not reported back to us. Check Audience → All contacts, and the batch results in the Mailchimp API if you need detail.
- With double opt-in, new people show as pending until they click the confirmation email.
- Mailchimp does not guarantee the order of operations in a batch. The member is always created with its tags; for someone brand new, the timeline event can occasionally be skipped.
- A
401means the API key is wrong or was revoked; a404on every conversion usually means the audience ID is wrong.