FileMaker Mailchimp Integration

Intuit's Mailchimp is one of the most powerful marketing tools, allowing you to engage with your customers and boost your business with an advanced yet easy-to-use platform. With over 12 million active customers and a total audience of over 4 billion, Mailchimp has become a leading marketing platform for businesses of all types. Companies that use both Claris FileMaker and Mailchimp for their email marketing campaigns often find themselves performing double data entry between systems. In this article, we will walk you through the step-by-step process to eliminate the hassle of manually updating your email lists by integrating your FileMaker solution with Mailchimp. You can follow along with the provided sample file and demo video.

Setting Up a Free Mailchimp Account

First, you will need to set up a Mailchimp account. Once you have your account, you will need to generate your API key. This key will be used to authenticate with the API so Mailchimp knows who you are. Make sure to generate an API key, not a client key for mobile apps.

Now that you have your API keys, we need to retrieve the Audience ID for your default audience. This ID will be used to specify where the API should push your contacts. Free accounts are limited to 1 audience (list); Essentials allows up to 3; Standard, up to 5; and Premium, unlimited. Navigate to all contacts, click on the Settings dropdown, and select "Audience name and defaults." From here, you can copy the Audience ID to the right.

Integrating With the Mailchimp Marketing API

The Mailchimp "add members to list" API call requires additional parameters beyond the URL-encoded parameters shown below. This API call requires an email and status to be passed in the request body. The two required parameters and any additional parameters must be JSON-encoded text, passed as parameters using the cURL variable.

It's important to note that with a successful API request, Mailchimp will NOT return a response to FileMaker. This means it's important to consider this in your error trapping, as FileMaker will generate a false error code 10 when no response is returned.

The API will return a response if an incorrect request is made. For example, if a contact unsubscribes to the list, the API is not allowed to resubscribe them. If this happens, Mailchimp will return an error along with the contact's subscription status, which you can parse using the native JSON.getElement() function.

Conclusion

Double data entry can be a thing of the past by integrating Intuit's Mailchimp with your FileMaker application. You can manage lists, activities, events, and much more through the Mailchimp API. Automate your surveys, email campaigns, and marketing processes while eliminating double data entry to avoid human blunders.

Ready to put Mailchimp to work in your FileMaker solution? Here's how we make that happen. Please contact us if you need further assistance or would like to discuss getting your FileMaker Solution integrated with Mailchimp.