How to get KPIs and metrics from the Mailchimp API

Mailchimp is a popular email marketing platform offering automation, audience segmentation, and campaign analytics for businesses of all sizes with an API giving you access to your lists and list statistics. You can find their documentation here: Mailchimp's API.

Contents

• Authentication
• Endpoint
• How to get your active subscribers count from Mailchimp

Authentication

To access MailChimp’s API you need to create a private API Token in the Extra’s section of your account.

Using Http Basic authentication with an empty username but the API token as the password you can then access the API.

Endpoint

The primary endpoint to get all lists is:

https://<DATACENTER>.api.mailchimp.com/3.0/lists

Note that the datacenter (first part of the endpoint) differs between accounts. To find the right datacenter, e.g us1 or us13, check the last part of your API token.

To get the list members you append the list-id

https://<DATACENTER>.api.mailchimp.com/3.0/lists/<list-id>

You currently can’t get historic data for contacts.

How to get your active subscribers count from Mailchimp

To get all contacts send a GET request to and specify the status:

https://<DATACENTER>.api.mailchimp.com/3.0/lists/<list-id>
  // Request only the statistics necessary to compute your member count
  ?fields=stats

This will return a stats property containing all your metrics:

{
  "stats": {
    "member_count": 1,
    "unsubscribe_count": 1,
    "cleaned_count": 0,
    "member_count_since_send": 2,
    "unsubscribe_count_since_send": 1,
    "cleaned_count_since_send": 0,
    "campaign_count": 0,
    "campaign_last_sent": "",
    "merge_field_count": 6,
    "avg_sub_rate": 0,
    "avg_unsub_rate": 30,
    "target_sub_rate": 30,
    "open_rate": 0,
    "click_rate": 0,
    "last_sub_date": "2024-09-17T11:53:19+00:00",
    "last_unsub_date": "2024-09-17T11:57:04+00:00"
  }
}

You can directly use the member_count value to get your active subscriber count. Alternatively you can use the other parameters as described in their docs to get other metric data.