6 Amazing Things You Can Do With Zapier & Mailchimp

Tired of the tedious detail work that comes with building and maintaining an email marketing list? Maybe it’s time to apply the tools within Zapier to your Mailchimp campaign.

If you’ve ever given any thought to having a robotic office assistant that can handle tasks without your walking them through each step (sorry, Alexa), you may not be able to go back to life as it was before you met Zapier. With more ways to use Zapier to integrate functionality into Mailchimp, there are endless tedious tasks that this tool can take off your hands. As the company’s website says, “Zapier makes you happier.”

6 ways to integrate Zapier with Mailchimp to automate your email marketing efforts

Although you can certainly automate Mailchimp from within the platform, what you can really accomplish there with multi-platform email automation is somewhat limited. However, adding Zapier integrations to your Mailchimp email marketing strategy can open up a whole new world of possibilities with your email list.

1. Trigger email campaigns from within Facebook Lead Ads

The biggest secret to any kind of marketing is eliminating the friction to a sale. When you can take a Facebook lead and use that to build, modify, or trigger your email marketing campaign, your potential lead will see how easy it is to get things done with your company -- such as signing up for coupons -- without having to jump through a lot of hoops.

Have a killer ad that’s just not generating many signups for your newsletter or stops to your shop? Adding those social media visitors to your email list from within one of the largest platforms on the planet can net more leads that you can then nurture with additional messaging from your very useful email marketing campaigns.

2. Save your scrubbed subscribers to Google Sheets

If you’ve kept an email list in Mailchimp, you know that you’re paying by the lead to have them hanging around, even if some of the data you’ve scrubbed out, but aren’t ready to lose. There are a couple of cool Zapier Mailchimp integrations that let you have your cake, without having to pay for it.

Like most email marketing software, Mailchimp will readily scrub both bounced emails and those users who have unsubscribed from your list, and store them in a special section of your email database.

Rather than paying rental space on all of that, Zapier can pair Google Sheets to Mailchimp and move that data to a spreadsheet you can use for other types of analytics, such as tracking the bounce percentages of your mailing list or trying to crack the secret of why your users are unsubscribing.

3. Get updates about your campaigns in your email

You can absolutely go straight to Mailchimp and run reports that will tell you exactly who has subscribed, unsubscribed, bounced, or been scrubbed. But why would you do all of that when Zapier can do it for you and save you a bunch of time in the doing?

If you’re managing a large email list, or several email lists, pouring over this data within Mailchimp can be pretty cumbersome. That’s why a Gmail integration makes so much sense. Rather than digging for answers for hours each week, Zapier can send you updates on your mailing lists at specified intervals.

4. Sign up customers to your mailing list at checkout

PayPal, Stripe, and other payment processing platforms can be linked to Mailchimp using Zapier. When a customer goes through checkout, their address is captured to allow for order fulfillment. What if you could also add them to your mailing list in one fell swoop? Well, now you can.

When a customer opts into your email list in your checkout process, you know you have a lead that has already decided that you must be pretty OK. After all, they gave you money, didn’t they?

These are actually really valuable leads since we know that it’s far more expensive to convert a fresh lead into a buyer than to sell more products or services to someone already familiar with your business, even if they’ve only made a single purchase.

5. Keep your team in the loop using Slack

Your team is already doing so many other things on Slack that it’s probably no huge surprise that Zapier can help make a love connection between it and Mailchimp, as well. There are a variety of things Zapier can help happen in Slack, but some of the most useful to your group would include posting about new Mailchimp subscribers and helping to police spelling and grammar errors. Yes, that’s really possible.

Of the over one dozen integrations Zapier offers for Mailchimp and Slack, few are more useful to an email marketing team than being made aware of new subscribers as they happen. This is doubly important if those leads are meant to be worked in real time.

Say, for example, a new lead pops into a dedicated Slack channel, which allows Tom to grab it and send that person a personal introduction to your product or service immediately. This can make it feel like your company is larger than it may be, as well as provide an extra personal touch for potential leads.

The other thing I mentioned above is also pretty cool, though. Using a third tool called Perfect Tense, Zapier can analyze your Mailchimp email campaigns, then send you a Slack message directly about any issues it finds. It won’t beat out a professional editor for accuracy, but these kinds of tools are often the next best thing if your budget is limited.

6. Add newly booked clients to your Mailchimp campaigns

Some companies, especially those in the service sector, can reduce appointment cancellations or abandonment by adding reminders for customers who set an appointment in the future. How many times have you made an appointment weeks ahead and then forgotten when the day came along? Just me? OK, never mind. Moving on.

For those customers who need a little more of a push, you can create a tiny email marketing campaign focused on lead retention by marrying popular online booking platforms like YouCanBook.Me, 10to8, and ScheduleOnce with Mailchimp via Zapier. This might contain some short emails that remind these leads what to bring with them for their appointment or request specific information prior to a meeting.

By dropping these breadcrumbs, not only does your potential lead get regular reminders that you do, in fact, exist, but they’ll have more investment and interest in making it to that super important meeting.

You can do even more with a Zapier upgrade

An upgraded Zapier account will give you further flexibility and control, as you can add deeply nested conditional statements. So, for example, let’s say you collect an email address and a physical address from PayPal at checkout. You can then choose to pass it to Mailchimp, where the email address is checked.

If the email addy doesn’t pass muster and instead bounces, you can have Zapier then filter that information to a spreadsheet or other collection location, so you can attempt to use the physical address for mailing paper marketing materials. You could also have Zapier send you a heads up in Slack so you know there was an email address with an error, just as a little cherry on top.

It’s not nearly as complicated as it sounds, and once your Zapier-Mailchimp integrations are built, you can simply set it and forget it. Sounds like some pretty simple stuff for that lead generation machine you plan to nurture for a while, doesn’t it?

Zapier and Mailchimp simplify email marketing

There’s a reason that Mailchimp is such a popular platform for email marketing, and it’s not because of the cute monkey (though that doesn’t hurt).

Even on its own, it’s a powerful tool in the right hands, allowing email marketers to not only get dramatic results with various segmentation tools and vital analytics but to perform a limited amount of automation to ease the time investment of regular email blasts or timed email marketing messages.

Using Zapier to further marry additional functionality from other web-based tools that run the gamut from payment processors to spreadsheets for storing extra data you aren’t quite ready to part with can supercharge your funky, funky mail monkey.

There’s not much in an email campaign that can’t be handled with automation if you have the right tools to do the job. Using Zapier gives you a lot more control over how different kinds of data are integrated into your email list or otherwise manipulated.