I have not created a campaign by hand in Mailchimp in six months, instead happily managing them using this script, so I thought I'd share it.
Here's how it works. Start by drafting your email in messages/. The message's "slug" thereafter will be the filename before .md; the slug, for example, of the message included in this project is 2021-july.
To create the campaign in Mailchimp:
ruby mailchimp.rb 2021-july create
Then, send a test email to an address of your choosing:
ruby mailchimp.rb 2021-july test [email protected]
Spot an error? Edit the Markdown file, then update the campaign in Mailchimp:
ruby mailchimp.rb 2021-july update
You can also delete the campaign from Mailchimp (leaving the Markdown file intact):
ruby mailchimp.rb 2021-july delete
That's it! There is currently no way to send from the command line, because the thought of making a mistake freaked me out too much. Better to log in, give everything a final look, and send from the Mailchimp website.
The template is in template.html and is presently very minimal. You can replace it, of course, with an HTML email template from elsewhere on Github or one of your own devising. Note the __YIELD__.
The basic configuration, including your Mailchimp API key, is stored in a file called config.yaml which you'll have to create yourself. It has this form:
api_key: "foo"
list_id: "bar"
data_center: "blee"
from_name: "Frodo Baggins"
reply_to: "[email protected]"
Note that by list_id I mean the ID of your Mailchimp audience; instructions for finding that ID are here.
As you'll see, this system is designed to send campaigns to audience segments based on tags. That is probably not what you want, so you'll have to rip out that logic, which is easily done: just delete "segment_opts" => segment_options in update_campaign_content.
I don't really expect this to be used as-is by anyone else, but it would have been a helpful starting point for me, six months ago, so now it can be a starting point for you!