About Mailchimp
Mailchimp is an email marketing platform used by a lot of small and mid-sized webshops. Your contacts live in an audience, and Customer Journeys send automated emails when something happens to a contact. One of the things that can start a journey is a custom event recorded on the contact, and that's what Zippendo sends.
Why connect Mailchimp to Zippendo?
Mailchimp knows your customers, but not what happens to their parcels after checkout. Zippendo creates your shipments, books them with the carrier and follows the tracking. Connect Mailchimp, and those steps are recorded as events on the customer's contact in your audience.
Tell customers their order is on the way
When Zippendo books a shipment with the carrier, the customer's contact gets a shipment_dispatched event. Start a Customer Journey on it and send a shipping email in your own Mailchimp template, with the tracking number from the event.
Follow up when tracking changes
A tracking_updated event is recorded whenever the carrier reports a new status, with the status as a property. Use it for a journey that keeps the customer posted while the parcel is on its way.
Keep order emails in one place
order_created, order_updated and shipment_cancelled let you keep order confirmations and cancellation notices in Mailchimp, next to the rest of your customer emails, whatever system the order came from.
Add conditions with automations
If only some orders should reach Mailchimp, build an automation in Zippendo: a trigger, a condition on any field, an optional delay and the Send Mailchimp Event action with your own event name and extra properties.
What you can do with Mailchimp and Zippendo
- shipment_created: a shipment was created in Zippendo
- shipment_dispatched: the shipment was booked with the carrier and has a label
- shipment_cancelled: the shipment was cancelled
- order_created and order_updated: an order came in or was changed
- tracking_updated: the carrier reported a new tracking status
- Event properties: order number, reference, tracking number, status, customer name and customer email, when the event carries them
- Your own event names: override the name per event on the connection, or per action in an automation
- Test event and delivery log: send a test event from the connection card and see every delivery attempt and Mailchimp's response
Mailchimp records events on a contact, so each event needs the customer's email address, and that contact has to be in the audience you connect.
How do I connect Mailchimp?
Mailchimp events come from your shipping, so connect your shop and a carrier first. Zippendo has ready-made integrations for Shopify and WooCommerce, and other systems can send orders through the API. Your shipping rules then book orders with carriers like GLS, PostNord or Bring. If you run your email elsewhere, Zippendo also connects to Klaviyo and Customer.io; see all integrations.
In Zippendo, open Apps & integrations, find Mailchimp in the catalog and click Connect. You need a Mailchimp API key and the Audience ID of the audience that should receive the events (find it under Audience, Settings, Audience name and defaults). Choose the events to send automatically, save, and send a test event. The Mailchimp setup guide in our docs covers each step and the common errors.
Mailchimp integration FAQ
Start automating with Mailchimp
Connect your Mailchimp audience, pick the events you want, and build your first Customer Journey on shipment_dispatched.
