How to Send Behavioral Emails with MailChimp and Moesif
In this guide you’ll learn how to send Moesif behavioral emails with Mailchimp.
Moesif behavioral emails is a feature that automatically sends emails to customers based on their API usage. This can be used to notify customers about technical issues, such as: hitting rate limits, using deprecated APIs, or trying to run broken integrations. You can even use it to trigger business-related events such as when an item is shipped. If something can be mapped to an API call, then you can send an email from it.
In a companion article, we covered how to configure behavioral emails within your Moesif dashboard.
Mailchimp is a managed email service. They offer an API to send emails to your users and host SMTP servers for you.
Prerequisites
This how-to guide requires a Moesif account and a Mailchimp account.
You also need a Mailchimp Transactional Account to use the Mailchimp API, which is a paid services, but Mailchimp offers a free trial.
Setting up an Email Server
The first step in setting up the email server is getting the SMTP credentials from Mailchimp:
- Address: smtp.mandrillapp.com
- Port: 25, 587, 2525, or 465 (SSL)
- Username: The primary contact email on your Mailchimp account
- Password: Any valid Mailchimp Transactional API key
The Mailchimp Transactional API key can be generated in settings. Simply click the “+New API Key” button and it will generate your key.
These credentials have to be entered into the Moesif email server configuration form.
To navigate to the form, follow the steps in the next screenshot.
You can copy and paste the credentials from the Mailchimp site to the Moesif site.
The Moesif form looks like this:
Testing the Setup
You can then send an example email via the freshly configured SMTP server with Moesif.
After you’ve configured the mailserver, create a new email template:
In the new template, fill in the required fields: template name, subject line and from email address.
Once that’s done, click the “Test” button and enter the target email.
If everything worked correctly, you’ll see the a new email in your inbox.
Summary
Setting up Moesif behavioral emails with Mailchimp only takes a few minutes.
Using a service like Mailchimp alleviates many common problems that might occur when sending email, such as validation issues or email being incorrectly identified as spam.
By combining Moesif’s behavioral email service with Mailchimp, you’re able to keep your API consumers abreast of important issues.