Destinations

Mailchimp

Add people to a Mailchimp audience, with tags, when they submit your form or when their lead reaches a stage.

The Mailchimp destination adds the people who fill in your form to a Mailchimp audience and can label them with tags, so your campaigns and automations have them from day one.

Mailchimp is a destination, which is part of the Pro plan. See Basic and Pro plans.

What you need from Mailchimp

The API key

  1. In Mailchimp, click your profile picture and open Account & billing.
  2. Go to Extras → API keys.
  3. Click Create A Key, name it (for example “PageFork”), and copy it.

The key ends in a short code such as -us21. That ending tells PageFork which Mailchimp data centre your account lives in, so copy the whole key including it.

The Audience ID

  1. Go to Audience → All contacts.
  2. Open Settings → Audience name and defaults.
  3. Copy the Audience ID, a short code such as a1b2c3d4e5.

A free Mailchimp account has one audience, and that one is fine.

Setting it up

  1. Open your site in the editor, open Settings and go to the Forms tab.
  2. Under Destinations, click Add and choose Mailchimp.
  3. Give it a Name and choose the Form scope.
  4. Choose the Triggers.
  5. Paste the Mailchimp API key. PageFork checks it with Mailchimp straight away.
  6. Paste the Audience id.
  7. Optionally add Tags, separated by commas: website, lead. You don’t need to create them in Mailchimp first.
  8. Set Email field to the field in your form that holds the visitor’s email address. It’s usually email.
  9. Click Create Mailchimp destination.

Your API key is stored encrypted. Afterwards PageFork only ever shows its last few characters.

Confirmation emails (double opt-in)

Your audience’s own setting decides, not PageFork.

In Mailchimp, under the audience’s Settings → Audience name and defaults, there is an Enable double opt-in checkbox.

  • Off (single opt-in): new people are added as Subscribed immediately.
  • On (double opt-in): new people are added as Pending and Mailchimp emails them a confirmation link. They become subscribed when they click it.

PageFork checks that setting on every delivery and follows it. It never forces someone straight to Subscribed on an audience that asks for confirmation.

People who are already in your audience

PageFork only sets a status for new contacts.

  • Someone already subscribed stays subscribed and gets any new tags.
  • Someone who unsubscribed stays unsubscribed. PageFork will not re-subscribe a person who opted out, even if they submit your form again. They need to rejoin through Mailchimp’s own signup form.

Tags

Tags are added, never removed. If one destination adds website on a new submission and another adds customer when the lead is won, the person ends up with both.

This makes tags the natural way to tell apart people who only enquired from people who bought:

DestinationTriggerTag
”Mailchimp signups”New submissionwebsite
”Mailchimp customers”→ Woncustomer

Using stage triggers

Think about consent. A stage trigger adds someone to your audience when you move their lead, not when they asked to join. Only use it for people who agreed to marketing emails, for example through a consent checkbox on your form. PageFork shows a reminder when you select a stage.

Stage triggers only fire for leads that came from a form. See what fires a destination.

Testing it

There is no Send test button for Mailchimp, deliberately: a test would add a made-up contact to your real audience.

Instead, submit your live form once with your own email address. Then:

  • In PageFork, open the destination. Recent deliveries should show success.
  • In Mailchimp, open Audience → All contacts and look for the address. With double opt-in on, it shows as pending until confirmed.

Use a real address for the test. Mailchimp rejects addresses that look fake, such as anything at example.com.

What is and isn’t sent

  • PageFork sends the email address and the tags. Names and other form fields are not sent to Mailchimp.
  • If a submission has no email address in the mapped field, the delivery is marked skipped. Nothing is sent and nothing counts as a failure.

Limits

  • 3 enabled Mailchimp destinations per site.

Troubleshooting

“Mailchimp API keys end in a datacenter suffix”. Part of the key is missing. Copy it again, including the ending such as -us21.

“Mailchimp rejected this API key” when saving. The key was typed wrong, or it has been disabled in Mailchimp. Create a new key and try again.

The destination was disabled with “invalid API key”. The key was deleted or disabled in Mailchimp. Delete the destination and create it again with a working key.

A delivery failed with a 400. Mailchimp refused that one address. The usual reasons are an address Mailchimp considers fake or undeliverable, or a contact that was permanently deleted from the audience, which Mailchimp won’t let an integration re-add.

A delivery failed with a 404. The Audience ID doesn’t match an audience in that account. Check it.

Deliveries say success but the contact isn’t subscribed. With double opt-in on they’re Pending until they click the confirmation email. If they had unsubscribed before, they stay unsubscribed.

Deliveries say skipped. The Email field you mapped is empty or missing on those submissions.

Next

Previous Kit Next Webhook destinations