2021, June 15: This article is outdated. Microsoft ended the support for the content pack ~3 years ago. Fortunately, two weeks ago I have released on AppSource a Power BI app that gets you covered and allows you to connect to your Mailchimp account to analyze your campaigns and audience. Read more here.
As some of you know, I recently started offering a free subscription service that includes sneak peaks to my new work and exclusive access to Power Bi Desktop files and Excel workbooks. To communicate with my subscribers I use the free MailChimp web service, which is a really awesome tool.
So today, while I am still waiting for Power BI team to publish my Sentiment Analysis blog post on their community blog (as promised here), I decided to try MailChimp content pack on Power BI. Here is a quick tutorial (with some bugs at the end, and some screenshots about my actual subscriber stats, so keep reading, if you want to “spy” on my MailChimp numbers).
Let’s Start
I forgot to mention, I assume you have a MailChimp account. Otherwise, you probably continue reading this to find out how many subscribers I have – Shame on you 🙂
First step is to login to PowerBI.com, and click Get Data.
Click Get in the Services box.
Find MailChimp and click Get.
Be patient. It take some time… But not too much.
In this relatively useless dialog, click Sign in.
Provide your MailChimp username and password, and click Log In. A personal note – I would expect to see a Power BI logo here instead of the second monkey. Otherwise, it looks like two monkeys playing ping pong with my data.
Give Power BI few seconds to load. You will notice two new entries for MailChimp under the Dashboards and Reports sections.
And here comes the bug. When you drill down to one of the Report pages from the Dashboard, or when you directly open any of the report pages, you may get the following error. At least I got it.
Clicking on any of the See Details links reveal this error dialog.
And here is another screenshot of the errors – This time with better numbers that are related to my MailChimp account 🙂
So, that is for today. It was shorter than I originally intended due to the bug, but I have opened a support ticket. Let’s see how it goes from here. I promise to write a second part, with more details, and perhaps also to try the MailChimp beta connector on Power BI Desktop.
Please subscribe to DataChant to get recent updates, and exclusive materials. In return, I may publish the MailChimp report for my subscribers, so all of you will see how many you are, from which countries you come, etc. etc. etc 🙂
