Sending in Chunks of 10,000....?

[CowChris]

http://us1.admin.mailchimp.com/campaigns/show?id=887402

As outlined by MailChimp's tech team, they do not supply a tool to
send a campaign in chunks of X , instead of all at one go (I'll refer
to this as staggering).

So, we're using the API and the segmenting system to build campaigns
assigned to chunks of users.

We do this by selecting the first 10,000 users, then applying an ID to
a Merge Field that we've setup. We setup a campaign to send to a
segment matchin that merge field's contents which equates to 10,000
users.

We're doing this via the API so we can automate this process, as doing
that manually would be mental.

We're using this method to update each of the members in teh list:
http://www.mailchimp.com/api/1.2/listupdatemember.func.php

The problem is that using listUpdateMember to churn through 10,000
members takes a long time, approx 1 hour to go through 10,000! This
obviously is an issue.

Is there a faster way we can achieve this?

Thanks,
Chris

[jesse]

Chris -
While I can't fathom why you'd want to segment for that reason, yes,
there are two ways to update your members that should be faster:

1) Use simultaneous calls to listUpdateMember() - just be aware of the
connection limits: http://www.mailchimp.com/api/faq/#faq6

2) Use listBatchSubscribe - http://www.mailchimp.com/api/1.2/listbatchsubscribe.func.php



jesse

[jo]

Hi,

We actually more or less have the same issue. We don't want to limit
our segmentation to blocks of 10.000, but we want to segment based on
data that's available in our ERP system (sales data etc). Therefor we
also tag our mailchimp records with a unique tag per campaign to
indicate who should receive it. We've considered the rate limiting in
our sync script and don't send out more than 3 calls/sec as to not hit
the limits and get delays added which would result in things running
even slower.

The rate limiting, is it considered per list, per api key, per
originating IP or on a global account basis?

We have different lists and it would be nice if we could sync our
different lists simultaneously at 3 calls/second.

Thanks for your reply,

Jo De Haes

On Dec 8, 4:46 pm, jesse <je...@mailchimp.com> wrote:
> Chris -
> While I can't fathom why you'd want to segment for that reason, yes,
> there are two ways to update your members that should be faster:
>
> 1) Use simultaneous calls to listUpdateMember() - just be aware of the
> connection limits:http://www.mailchimp.com/api/faq/#faq6
>

> 2) Use listBatchSubscribe -http://www.mailchimp.com/api/1.2/listbatchsubscribe.func.php

[jesse]

Rate limiting is at the account level, so there's no way around it
using different list or api key combinations. The connection limits
mentioned look at IP addresses.

Sounds like what you're doing is a typical case of segmenting on a
merge field. The easiest way to avoid any limiting is to update your
members in batches using listBatchSubscribe - using that you shouldn't
come remotely close to any of our limits.


jesse