Api to pull data from an external online database

[SMART]

Hi

I am new to Mailchimp and cannot find a way to pull live data from an
external database. I'd appreciate any help!

I hold my customer's purchase history and Loyalty Points in a database
on my website. I would like to include my customer's latest Loyalty
Points balance within any email that I send out. My website database
has an email field and points field for each record, along with names
etc etc.

Anyone know if this can be done.

[jesse]

You're looking at this backwards. The best thing to do first is go
through our Getting Started guide so you are familiar with how our
service works and what the terms we use for things are.

http://kb.mailchimp.com/article/whats-the-best-way-to-get-started-with-mailchimp

At the very least, make sure you read up on merge tags:

http://kb.mailchimp.com/article/getting-started-with-merge-tags

Then go read how-tos #3 and #4 here:

http://apidocs.mailchimp.com/how-to/


jesse

[SMART]

Thanks for your comments - I have read all these and have already set
up an interface to update the MC lists when people or added or
subscribe to my database. So far so good! What I can't do is find a
way to pull live data from my database, based on the email field, to
insert into an email at the time that the email is sent out.

In the scenario I demonstrated above, it would be impractical to keep
on uploading my database into MC each time the Loyalty Points in my
database changed - they change 1000's of times per day! I therefore
need a way to build a list based on my external data "on the fly", so
I can pull all the data, email address, names, loyalty points etc, or
a way that I can use my list held in MC and ten pull the associated
records from my data to populate the loyalty points field.

I hope that this explains it clearer!

Richard

On May 6, 8:44 pm, jesse <je...@mailchimp.com> wrote:
> You're looking at this backwards. The best thing to do first is go
> through our Getting Started guide so you are familiar with how our
> service works and what the terms we use for things are.
>

> http://kb.mailchimp.com/article/whats-the-best-way-to-get-started-wit...

[jesse]

No, because it is equally, if not more so, as impractical for us to
try to reach out to external sources to populate custom data for every
member on a list as a campaign is being built.

I also wouldn't update records every single time a change is made. The
suggestions in how to #3 regarding tracking which users need to be
updated and then doing one batch sync every so often (probably
nightly) are what you should be looking at doing.


jesse

[SMART]

That's a shame - my current Email Marketing company, Jangomail, does
it really well!

May be you might like to check out the feature at www.jangomail.com,
with the huge amount of features you do offer I am sure that it would
compliment your offering.