Activate customer profiles on Mailchimp

Learn how to synchronize customer profiles with a Mailchimp audience for activation.

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Krenalis makes it easy to sync customer profiles from your data warehouse to a Mailchimp audience. By connecting your Mailchimp account, you can keep every profile up to date—no manual imports or scripts required. Once connected, Krenalis automatically exports and updates contacts based on your defined filters and transformations, ensuring your marketing lists always reflect the latest data.

How it works

  1. Choose where to sync. Select the Mailchimp audience to keep up to date.
  2. Select your audience. Choose which customer profiles to include.
  3. Map the data. Match each property from your Customer Model to Mailchimp fields using Visual Mapping, JavaScript, or Python.
  4. Set the schedule. Choose how often Krenalis synchronizes profiles.
  5. Keep it fresh. Krenalis automatically updates your Mailchimp audience, adding or updating contacts when new profiles appear.

The result: your Mailchimp audience always mirrors your customer data, ready for activation in your marketing campaigns.

Steps

Follow these steps in the Krenalis Admin console to connect Mailchimp and set up profile exports.

1. Generate the Mailchimp API key

  1. Log in to your Mailchimp account.
  2. Click the round account button in the top-right corner.
  3. In the menu, select Account & billing.
  4. Click Extras.
  5. Click API keys.
  6. Under Your API keys, click Create A Key.
  7. Enter an API Key Name (for example, "Krenalis").
  8. Click Generate Key.
  9. Copy the key displayed on screen.

2. Connect Krenalis with Mailchimp

  1. In your Krenalis workspace, open the Destinations page.
  2. Click Add a new destination ⊕, then select the Mailchimp card.
  3. Click Add destination....
  4. (Optional) In Name, enter a label to identify the connection later.
  5. Paste the API key you copied earlier.
  6. Click Next
  7. From the Audience menu, select the Mailchimp audience and click Add to complete the connection.

3. Add a pipeline to export profiles

On the connection page, click on Add pipeline... to define how profiles should be exported to Mailchimp.

Add pipeline

Each pipeline tells Krenalis which data to send and how to structure it in Mailchimp. You can define multiple pipelines per destination to manage different datasets.

4. Filter profiles

If you don't want to send all profiles to Mailchimp, use filters to select which profiles to sync. Only profiles that match the filter conditions will be synced. If no filters are set, all profiles will be exported. For more information on how to use filters, see the Filters documentation.

Filter

5. Set how contacts sync to Mailchimp

The Export settings section tells Krenalis how to recognize your contacts and what pipelines to take to keep Mailchimp perfectly in sync with your latest customer data — automatically and without manual updates.

Export settings

  • Choose matching fields
    Select one property from your Krenalis data and one from Mailchimp to compare — usually something unique like an email address or customer ID. Krenalis uses these fields to check if a contact already exists in Mailchimp. What happens next depends on the sync rules you choose below.

  • Decide how handle each contact You can choose to add new contacts when they don't exist in Mailchimp, update existing ones when their information changes, or do both.

  • Manage duplicate contacts
    If more than one Krenalis profile shares the same matching value, you can define how Krenalis should handle them. These settings help keep your data clean and avoid unwanted duplicates in your audience.

6. Transformation

Use the Transformation section to decide how customer data is written to Mailchimp contacts. You can visually map properties from the Customer Model to Mailchimp fields, or use JavaScript and Python for more advanced logic (for example, formatting dates or combining multiple properties).

Filter

7. Save your changes

When everything looks good, click Add (or Save if you're editing an existing pipeline).

To export another set of profiles to the same audience, repeat the process starting with the Add a pipeline to export profiles step.

Pipelines

Once saved, the new pipeline appears in the pipelines list for Mailchimp. From here, you can monitor imports, adjust filters, and manage transformations. Each pipeline defines how and when profiles flow from your warehouse to Mailchimp.

With a single Mailchimp connection, you can create multiple export pipelines to sync different data segments within the same account.

Pipeline to activate profiles
Column Description
Pipeline Name and description of the pipeline.
Filters Conditions used to select which profiles are exported. If not set, all profiles are included.
Enable Switch to activate or deactivate the pipeline. When disabled, the pipeline will not run, even if a schedule is defined.
Run now Run the export immediately, one time only. Available only when the pipeline is enabled.
Schedule Frequency of automatic exports. You can also run the export manually at any time.
Manage Edit settings such as filter and transformation.
⋮ (More) Additional options, such as deleting the pipeline.