Mailchimp to Amazon S3

This page provides you with instructions on how to extract data from Mailchimp and load it into Amazon S3. (If this manual process sounds onerous, check out Stitch, which can do all the heavy lifting for you in just a few clicks.)

What is MailChimp?

MailChimp is a marketing automation platform and email marketing service that companies use to send more than a billion email messages a day.

What is S3?


Getting data out of MailChimp

MailChimp also offers a RESTful API for syncing campaign information and stats. To get your MailChimp data into your data warehouse, you can extract it from MailChimp's servers using the MailChimp API. To get information about a campaign with the API, for example, you could call GET /campaigns/{campaign_id}.

MailChimp generates a lot of data. Anytime you send an email or someone opens and reads one, it generates an event. Depending on your needs, you may want to use webhooks to receive streaming updates of these events as they happen. If so, you'll need to build code on your end to receive the streaming data.

Sample MailChimp data

The MailChimp API returns JSON-formatted data. A call to get campaign information might return data that looks like this.

  "id": "42694e9e57",
  "type": "regular",
  "create_time": "2018-12-15T14:40:36+00:00",
  "archive_url": "",
  "status": "save",
  "emails_sent": 0,
  "send_time": "",
  "content_type": "template",
  "recipients": {
    "list_id": "57afe96172",
    "segment_text": ""
  "settings": {
    "subject_line": "I have a watermelon farm.",
    "title": "Freddie's Jokes Vol. 1",
    "from_name": "Freddie",
    "reply_to": "",
    "use_conversation": false,
    "to_name": "",
    "folder_id": 0,
    "authenticate": true,
    "auto_footer": false,
    "inline_css": false,
    "auto_tweet": false,
    "fb_comments": false,
    "timewarp": false,
    "template_id": 100,
    "drag_and_drop": true
  "tracking": {
    "opens": true,
    "html_clicks": true,
    "text_clicks": false,
    "goal_tracking": true,
    "ecomm360": true,
    "google_analytics": true,
    "clicktale": ""
  "delivery_status": {
    "enabled": false
  "_links": [
      "rel": "parent",
      "href": "",
      "method": "GET",
      "targetSchema": "",
      "schema": ""
      "rel": "self",
      "href": "",
      "method": "GET",
      "targetSchema": ""
      "rel": "delete",
      "href": "",
      "method": "DELETE"
      "rel": "cancel_send",
      "href": "",
      "method": "POST"
      "rel": "feedback",
      "href": "",
      "method": "GET",
      "targetSchema": ""

Preparing MailChimp data



Loading data into Amazon S3


Keeping MailChimp data up to date


The key is to build your script in such a way that it can identify incremental updates to your data. Thankfully, MailChimp's API results include fields like create_time that allow you to identify records that are new since your last update (or since the newest record you've copied). Once you've take new data into account, you can set your script up as a cron job or continuous loop to keep pulling down new data as it appears.

And remember, as with any code, once you write it, you have to maintain it. If MailChimp modifies its API, or the API sends a field with a datatype your code doesn't recognize, you may have to modify the script. If your users want slightly different information, you definitely will have to.

Other data warehouse options


Easier and faster alternatives


Thankfully, products like Stitch were built to move data from Mailchimp to Amazon S3 automatically. With just a few clicks, Stitch starts extracting your Mailchimp data via the API, structuring it in a way that's optimized for analysis, and inserting that data into your Amazon S3 data warehouse.