The Rules Engine

The basics

Rules are a flexible way to change sending behavior based on searchable criteria in your Mailchimp Transactional account. The rules engine lets you take specific actions when events or messages meet criteria you’ve set.

This documentation covers how rules work and how to create one in the rules engine. For a full range of examples, see the Change Sending Behavior with the Rules Engine guide.

Rule format

Every rule starts with the basic logic:

if any email matches this then do that

But in the rules engine, there are actually three components to every rule: the trigger, the condition, and the action. For example:

if an email is sent with a subject line that includes the term “event,” then apply the custom events template

The trigger: sending an email. The condition: the subject line must have the word “event” in it. The action: apply the events template. 

Rules can have multiple criteria, and those criteria can contain wildcard pattern matches. Mailchimp Transactional supports the fnmatch format for wildcard pattern matching. 

For example, if you want to create a new rule that looks for emails containing “QA” anywhere in the subject line, your rule condition would look like this:

subject line matches QA

But if you want to create a new rule that looks for any emails containing “[QA]” in the subject line, you need to escape the brackets. Your rule condition would look like this:

subject line matches [QA]

Triggers

When you navigate to the rules engine in your Mailchimp Transactional account, you’ll be able to see the full range of message triggers you can use to start your rule: 

• is sent
• is delayed
• is bounced
• is soft-bounced
• is opened
• is clicked
• recipient unsubscribes
• is marked as spam
• is rejected
• is inbound

Conditions

Each rule can have one or more conditions:

• recipient’s email matches or does not match
• sender’s email matches or does not match
• subject line matches or does not match
• tags contains or does not contain
• template is or is not
• api key is or is not
• matched rules contains or does not contain
• random sample %

Actions

Each rule can take one or more actions: 

• do nothing
• send event to webhook

For sent messages, rules can take the following additional actions:

• reject message
• add google analytics
• add tag
• set template
• set open tracking
• set click tracking
• set text generation from HTML
• set HTML generation from text
• set CSS inlining
• set content logging
• set subaccount
• set merge tag language
• add unsubscribe footer

Create a rule

To create a new rule in your Mailchimp Transactional account:

1. Navigate to Rules
2. Click Add Rule
3. Add a descriptive name for your rule
4. Set the trigger for your rule and set your if/then condition(s)
5. Click Submit

Before you save a new rule, you’ll see the approximate number of emails you sent in the past seven days that match the rule’s criteria, but the rule won’t affect messages you’ve already sent.

Structuring your rules

Rules can affect—and are affected by—the content of your messages, so it’s important that they’re applied in a consistent order.

For example, you might have a rule that matches emails from a specific sender and sets the template to my-template. You may have another rule that matches emails using my-template and adds the tag my-tag. Whether or not the email will receive my-tag depends on whether the rule that adds the template is applied before or after the rule that adds the tag. 

To help control this, Mailchimp Transactional lets you sort your rules. Drag rules up or down depending on how you want to order them, and they will be applied consistently from the top of the list to the bottom.

Nesting

Nested rules let a rule refer to other rules in its conditions. You can use nested rules to avoid repetition if the same conditions are duplicated across multiple rules. 

For example, here are nested rules that send Gmail password reset emails to a webhook: