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Just a quick little how-to on Mailchimp and Magento using the existing extension by Ebizmarts. We want to be able to send customers who sign up for the newsletter through the Magento store a little thank you gift (discount code) X days after signing up using Mailchimp’s excellent autoresponders. This is supported by Mailchimp, but requires double opt-in or the following little 2 step work-around with the Mailchimp API.

For this I’ll assume you have got as far as the Mailchimp list being populated when a Magento customer subscribes, and removed when they unsubscribe. This will require a little modification to the Magento and Mailchimp integration, so only proceed if you’re comfortable with that.

Step 1: Configure your Mailchimp list to have a pseudo sign up date

This is mentioned in the Mailchimp support section, but I’ll quickly add my notes here for completeness.

Go into the lists section and select the forms link for the particular list you are adding emails to from within Magento. From the forms page you can add a new date field that looks something like this:

Field Settings for a new sign on date field

Note that whatever you choose for the field tag e.g. SIGNON on this screen needs to match what you use in the code change I’ll show you in step 2. What a perfect segue….

Step 2: Modify the Mailchimp extension (ever so slightly)

The code change is very minor, and assumes you always want to add this Merge var – so it’s not very elegant. In fact it’s arguably a hack, but I haven’t posted one of those for a while so here goes. Modify the file app/code/local/Ebizmarts/Mailchimp/Model/Mailchimp/Mailchimp.php around line 114 so that it looks like this:

if ( $this->getXMLSubscribeConfig('opt-in') != '' ) {
	$merge_vars['OPTINIP'] = $this->getXMLSubscribeConfig('opt-in');
}
// Add this line - be sure you match 'SIGNON' here with the code you chose in Mailchimp...
$merge_vars['SIGNON'] = date("Y-m-d"); // today's date
try {
	$apikey = $this->getXMLGeneralConfig('apikey');

Right so with that change, your Mailchimp list will now get a new variable populated which can in turn be used as a date for the autoresponders within Mailchimp like so:

Set the autoresponder to use the new date you added in Step 1.

Interestingly this same approach can be used to add all sorts of useful information gained from Magento into your Mailchimp list e.g. Source of visit CPC/Organic etc.

Note: this code change will go away if you upgrade the Mailchimp extension – maybe someone will make this part of the extension so that it is less prone to being hosed by upgrades. Until then, beware.

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