Migrating from MailChimp/Mandrill

[dciartform]

Hi,

I’ve been tasked with looking into migrating away from MailChimp/Mandrill (MC/MD) to ActiveCampaign for a system that I work on.

For our system, we heavily utilize the transactional email system in MC/MD. We have users who enter in information into a desktop application that sends that data to a backend (BE) service which processes the data and sends it to a MD endpoint: https://mandrillapp.com/api/1.0/messages/send-template.json

From here, it’s a matter of sending an API key, the email template ID, From/To info, and a set of merge variables to substitute in for placeholders in the email template, for example:

  <font style="font-size:20px;font-weight:bold;">Thank you for visiting *|LOCATION|*</font>'

I tried doing a search on the forum, and skimmed through the API documents, and was hoping I’m just missing something, because I couldn’t find any API calls that similar. I found the following: Overview, but the API doesn’t really make clear what a “Message” is as far as emails go. I’d rather not guess.

I was hoping someone here could point me in the right direction, or explain what I might be missing.

I did find this particular thread:

Transactional system emails

Hi, We are coming from Mandrill and we use it to send transactional emails such as “Welcome to the system” or “You have received a new reward” etc. With Mandrill you pass the email template identifier (e.g. welcome-email) the addressee (to: field) and the email merge variables to replace, e.g. name: ‘Roger’, signedUpDate: ‘Tuesday 2nd June’ Is there an equivalent ability with AC? Thanks for your help. Doug

but thought since a few years have since passed, perhaps everything has updated since then.

Thanks for any help you may be able to provide! It is appreciated.

[mreibach]

Hello,

The other thread that you found is still pretty accurate at this point. As one reply mentioned, you can automate the ‘transactional’ behavior using some combination of custom fields, event tracking, event start triggers, and personalization tags.

If you are looking to go the API route, I don’t believe this can currently be accomplished via the v3 APIs. However, you can create and send campaigns with the v1 APIs. If you are looking to create and send the campaign immediately, you can use the campaign_create call. If you want to send a previously created (either via the API or in the ActiveCampaign UI) you can use the campaign_send call.

I hope this helps point you in the right direction!
-Matt