Send leads to Mailchimp

What you need

An API key: Mailchimp → your avatar → Account & billing → Extras → API keys. The key ends with its datacenter, for example -us21, which is how we know which server to talk to.

Connect and route

1. In Destinations, connect Mailchimp with the key.
2. Create a route and pick the audience.
3. Map the fields. The email address is required. Your audience's merge fields (FNAME, LNAME and any you have added) appear in the list, and New field creates one if it is missing.

You can map a fixed value to the tags field to label everything that comes from the assistant.

One route per widget, and so one per form

A route's scope is a widget. Leave it on all widgets and the route takes every lead; pin it to one and it takes only that widget's.

That is also how two forms reach two places, because a widget runs one form: its lead capture names the form it asks, so choosing the widget chooses the form. A contact form on one widget and a demo request on another are two routes, each to its own destination. Two forms on the same widget is not a thing you can set up -- swap the widget's form and you have changed which form it asks.

Choosing a widget does one more thing: the mapper's left column shows the questions that form asks, instead of every question every form in the workspace asks. So a route built for the demo request is not mapped against the contact form's fields, and the questions on screen are the ones a visitor will actually be asked. Leave the route on all widgets and you get all of them, which is right -- the route takes leads from all of them.

One consequence worth knowing: a lead captured by the assistant in conversation carries the widget it came from, so a widget-scoped route takes it like any other. A lead pushed through the API with no widget is taken only by a route with no widget.

Subscription status

A new contact is added as subscribed. Someone who previously unsubscribed is not flipped back: Mailchimp keeps their status and we never override it. That is deliberate, and it is what keeps you compliant.

Check it before a visitor does

• Check connection on the account re-asks Mailchimp whether the key still works and records the answer with today's date.
• Send sample lead adds one invented contact to the audience this route points at, so you can see exactly what arrives. It uses the same mapping a real lead uses, and the dispatch log marks it as a sample -- it is not stored as a lead and does not count against your plan. Remove the sample contact from the audience afterwards if you keep your list clean.

When it fails

The dispatch log shows Mailchimp's own message. The three you will actually meet:

"ada@example.com looks fake or invalid, please enter a real email address." Mailchimp screens every address before it accepts it, and refuses whole domains it treats as placeholders -- example.com among them. The lead is still saved in WelcomeAI; only the Mailchimp send failed. There is nothing to fix at this end: a visitor who typed a throwaway address will not reach an audience.

"A Merge Field with the tag BUDGETRANG already exists for this list." Mailchimp tags are ten characters, and we build one from the field's label -- so two labels that start the same way used to collide. We now step around a tag the audience already has (BUDGETRAN2), so you should not see this unless you created the field in Mailchimp yourself. Field labels keep their accents: Dirección de envío becomes DIRECCIOND.

A merge field that does not exist on that audience. The route maps onto a tag the audience no longer has. Re-open the route, refresh the field list and map it again, or let the route builder create the field for you.