The MailChimp API is a way for you to "sync" your customer database, CRM, CMS, or e-commerce shopping cart with MailChimp. It's really powerful stuff.

Benefits

If you sync your customer database into MailChimp, you won't have to constantly import your updated lists into MailChimp, then export them again into your system, then manually clean any differences. They'll both be "in sync" automatically. But it doesn't stop there. You can sync your campaign stats too. The possibilities are endless:

• Web designers can create private label "client portals" where they can log in and grab campaign stats (case study)
• Add a "Subscribe to Newsletter" option to your e-commerce checkout page
• Pass purchase history data into MailChimp, create list segments, and send targeted campaigns
• Publishers can sync "active subscription" data into MailChimp, so that only up-to-date accounts receive emails
• Link campaign stats to your internal database for "behavioral targeting"
• Sync email activity with your customer database

Basic Details

Our new and improved API will now give you the tools you need to manage your lists and get stats for your campaigns. You can connect into our API using XML-RPC or a simple HTTP POST or HTTP GET. Then you can get the data back out in php serialization strings, JSON, XML, or plain ol' XML-RPC. This gives you the most flexibility to connect to us however you like and get data back in a form that's going to be very quick and easy for you to work with.

There are three sets of functions currently covered by our API:

1. List Management Functions
2. Campaign Creation and Sending Functions
3. Campaign Statistics Functions

List Management

With the List Management Functions, you can subcribe users to your lists, unsubscribe them, or even update their profiles from your own server. You can also get info about your lists, such as how many unsubsribes you have, and how many emails have been cleaned from your lists.

Campaign Creation and Sending

These functions will allow you to create, update, and even reuse campaigns for what we hope is the ultimate flexibility in campaign management. Once you have them ready, we also have several functions to allow you to send your campaigns whenever you please.

Campaign Statistics

With the Campaign Functions, you can grab all the stats for your campaigns (opens, clicks, etc) as well as bounces and unsubs (this can be really handy if you need to update your internal databases).

How To Get Started

The MailChimp API is available in 3 forms (XML-RPC, PHP, and JSON). It's available free of charge. Here's the documentation.

Not A Programmer?

The API is for nerds only. If you're not a programmer, and you don't have one in your company that you can bribe, here's a list of MailChimp Experts.