Python for Entrepreneurs Transcripts
Chapter: Building your email list
Lecture: Concept: The MailChimp API
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0:03
So what does it take to integrate with MailChimp?
0:05
Well, you saw after we created our account we just have to pip install MailChimp
0:09
and we got that from PyPi, that was awesome,
0:12
and then we had to figure out a way to get our secrets, our API key and our list id,
0:18
API key is really important to keep secret, list id not so much.
0:22
You'll see that you'd have to actually put that in some of the forms
0:26
that you put on your page if you take some of the form code I think,
0:29
but the API key, you want to make this is not shared, so be careful with it.
0:34
Here you saw we put it into our project.ini file,
0:37
we have the development.ini and the production.ini
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and then we're going to use the config.get_settings to pull that out by key
0:44
so here config.get_settings gets that settings dictionary right there
0:48
and then we just get the value from the dictionary,
0:50
it's just a Python dictionary by name,
0:53
so we store the API key and the mailing list id and then we pass that on to our app,
0:57
we had crated that mailing list service class
0:59
that we just stored it globally as a static field there.
1:03
Now we want to add subscribers, of course, we get the email address,
1:07
if you can get their first name and last name that's great,
1:09
if you don't have it, you can just put the email address,
1:12
and we're going to use MailChimp's class, so mailchimp
1:17
the package.mailchimp the class
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and we create that by calling initializer with the API key
1:22
and it gets us the API, then we just say api.lists.subscibe and it takes the list id,
1:27
the email address as a dictionary, funky, double_optin True or False, that's up to you,
1:33
you've got to decide for yourself, and so update_existing=True, replace_interests=False.
1:38
Now, why do you want to do this False?
1:40
Well, we can look at segmentation, just for a minute.
1:43
If we want to actually put people into different groups,
1:47
maybe they are coming in as an unqualified lead,
1:49
and then once they have bought an album,
1:52
we could both indicate both which album they bought as well as
1:56
that they are a purchaser of an album and once they have attended the live event,
2:00
we could put them in yet another group and we could go to MailChimp and say
2:03
"show me all the people who have come to a live event,
2:05
show me all the people who have bought one of our albums.
2:08
I want to mail everybody who bought this album,
2:12
and tell them there is now a new bonus track that they could download."
2:14
So you would use segmentation and groups for that,
2:16
so here is the code you've got to write for that, it's not super obvious but it's not hard either.
2:20
So you've got to go to MailChimp, and actually go to the list
2:23
and go to the interest groups then create a group and then within there
2:28
you have to create little subgroups called interest and groupings
2:32
and once you do that, you can take those and subscribe people to it,
2:35
so suppose I have a group or an interest named TalkPython groups
2:41
and one of the subgroups is called Training,
2:45
so there will be all the people who took my classes, right,
2:48
as opposed to people who signed up through the podcast
2:50
or some other random source that they may be signed up.
2:54
So, here would be Training and if I want to indicate put on this list
2:58
and flag them or segment them to know that they came from the training angle,
3:02
not the podcast angle, then I would do something like this,
3:04
I would create this group and this subgroup and then piece in code
3:07
and then I would use the merge_vars with groupings set to that value
3:12
and both lower case and uppercase because sometimes it varies,
3:16
that's kind of funky but you know, you do what works sometimes
3:19
when you are working with APIs right?
3:22
And it's in this case where replace_interests may be important to be False,
3:26
if you want to have them additionally in say like the PyGrass group
3:30
and the Training group if you knew that they came from both locations,
3:33
right, did you say replace_interest is False.
