Question

I’m using Rails 3 and I would like to know if there’s a way to schedule deliveries for MailChimp campaigns.

MailChimp suggests these gems/plugins in order to create and manage lists/campaigns, but I cannot find how to schedule them.

If there isn’t a known way for doing this using MailChimp, could anybody suggest me another email marketing provider where I can do this?

Answer 1

MailChimp offers two different types of scheduled delivery: campaign scheduling and timewarp. Timewarp is used to deliver at a specific time of day around the globe. It sounds like you just want to schedule a time for all emails to be sent – that is just campaign scheduling.

When you use the API, you first call campaignCreate to setup your draft campaign:
http://apidocs.mailchimp.com/api/1.3/campaigncreate.func.php

Once you have created your draft campaign you can:
Send a test (to yourself):
http://apidocs.mailchimp.com/api/1.3/campaignsendtest.func.php

Schedule the campaign to be sent in the future:
http://apidocs.mailchimp.com/api/1.3/campaignschedule.func.php

Or send the campaign immediatly:
http://apidocs.mailchimp.com/api/1.3/campaignsendnow.func.php

You can also setup a/b split, etc… Just checkout the docs for the full features:
http://apidocs.mailchimp.com/api/1.3/#campaignrelated

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“Ruby on Rails – acts_as_chimp” already has the campaignSchedule method included…. But it uses the old username/password authentication.. Your probably better off reading the api docs and modifying ‘Hominid’ to suit your needs