Mailchimp is an all-in-one marketing platform that provides tools and services for businesses to manage their email marketing campaigns, automate marketing processes, and build relationships with their audience. 

While you can benefit from Mailchimp’s standalone features and capabilities in a variety of ways, you can get even more value by integrating Mailchimp with your product or your internal applications. 

To integrate with Mailchimp, you’ll first need to procure your unique API key. We’ll break down the steps for doing exactly that below!

Create a Mailchimp account

If you don't have a Mailchimp account, sign up for one on the Mailchimp website.

Log in to your Mailchimp account 

Use your username and password to access your Mailchimp dashboard.

Related: The steps for retrieving your API key in Quickbooks Online

Navigate to the API keys page

In the upper right corner, select your account icon and navigate to the “Account & billing” section. 

Once there, select “Extras” and click “API keys” 

Generate your API key 

Select “Create a key”. 

Name your API key and hit “Generate Key.” Afterward, you’ll be able to copy your key and begin using it!  

Note: All your API keys will be stored and accessible in your account under the “Extras” section in “API keys”.

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Now you’re ready to start integrating! 

Related: A guide to automating with marketing automation solutions

Other key considerations for building to the Mailchimp API

Before integrating with Mailchimp's API, it’s worth considering other items:

Pricing

Mailchimp offers a default set of subscriptions, but their prices vary based on the number of contacts your organization has.

In the screenshot and bullet points below, you'll find the pricing across the subscriptions for 500 contacts; you can easily change that number on their pricing page. 

• Premium: $350/month, which includes 15,000 monthly email sends, unlimited users, unlimited audiences, and a lot more
• Standard: $20/month, which includes 6,000 monthly email sends, 5 user seats, and 5 audiences, and 1 personalized on-boarding session 
• Essentials: Free for 1 month and then $13/month after. This plan includes 5,000 monthly email sends, 3 user seats, and 3 audiences, with limited reporting and analytics 
• Free: $0/month, which includes the basics: 1,000 monthly email sends, 1 user seat, 1 audience, and limited reporting and analytics 

Rate Limits

Mailchimp states that the Marketing API sets a limit of 10 simultaneously processing requests per user. You can learn more in their developer documentation here.

Related: How to stop getting rate limited by APIs 

Errors to look out for 

The Mailchimp API will return a variety of errors if anything goes wrong with your API calls. Every error has an HTTP status code, and will also return an error type and brief explanation when the error is triggered. 

Some common errors are:

• 400 Bad Request 
• 401 API Key Invalid 
• 403 Forbidden 
• 404 Resource not found
• 405 Method Not Allowed
• 429 TooManyRequests: You have exceeded the limit of 10 simultaneous connections.

For a full list of common errors, visit Mailchimp’s documentation here. 

Final thoughts

Many of your customers use other marketing automation tools, like Hubspot, ActiveCampaign, and Keap. 

You can offer integrations with any of the marketing automation solutions your clients use by building to Merge’s Marketing Automation Unified API. 

To learn more about the API, and Merge’s platform more broadly, you can schedule a demo with one of our integration experts!