Integrations

Sending email through Mailchimp Transactional

Read this first: this card needs Mailchimp Transactional, which is a paid add-on. It is sometimes still called Mandrill, and it is not the same thing as an ordinary Mailchimp account. If all you have is the usual newsletter account, there is no key to find and nothing on this page will work until you add Transactional to it.

With it, your agent can email people during a call — a confirmation, directions, a quote, anything the caller asks to have in writing. The email goes out from your address, so what arrives in their inbox has your business name on it and not ours. There is no mail server to set up: you copy a key from Mailchimp Transactional and paste it here.

Caller-verification codes can go out from your address too. There is a switch for it when you connect; leave it off and codes come from the Vocarium address instead.

Where to find your key

In Mailchimp Transactional, open Settings and then API keys, create a key, and copy it. A plain Mailchimp account has no such page — that is the sign the add-on is missing.

The address you send from

Your from address needs to be on a domain you have verified in Mailchimp Transactional. Do that step on their site before you connect here.

Connecting

  1. Open Actions & Integration and press Connect on the Mailchimp Transactional card.
  2. Paste the API key.
  3. Fill in the from address — the address your emails should come from. This one is required.
  4. Add a from name if you want your business name shown beside the address, and decide whether verification codes should come from this address too.

We test the key against Mailchimp before saving anything, so a key that is wrong or cannot send comes back as a message in the dialog rather than as an email that quietly never arrives. The key is stored encrypted and is never shown again.

Only one email connection

You can have one email connection, not several. The Email card and the five key-based cards all answer the same question — which address does this business write from — so connecting a second one is refused, and the message tells you which one you already have. Disconnect that one first. Reconnecting Mailchimp itself is not a second connection, so replacing a key you have changed works normally.

If something goes wrong

  • The key is refused when you connect. Here it is almost always the missing Transactional add-on. Otherwise: a key copied with a space on the end, or one that has been deleted or replaced.
  • The from address is refused. Mailchimp has to know the address is yours before it will send from it. Verify the domain there, then come back — the wording in the error is theirs, not ours.
  • Emails are not arriving. Check the address the agent read back to the caller, then check the junk folder. If a domain was only just verified, give it a few minutes.
  • Nothing gets sent twice. If a send fails we report it rather than trying again, because a retry would mean two identical confirmations in somebody's inbox.
  • There are limits. At most 2 emails on any one call, and 100 a day for your whole account. They are there so a confused conversation cannot burn through your sending allowance. Ask us if you need them raised.
  • Emails are plain text. No formatting, no images, no attachments — what the agent writes is what arrives.
  • Nothing is charged here. The email leaves on your own Mailchimp account and against your allowance there, so nothing comes off your Vocarium balance.