Welcome to a practical Zapier tutorial! In this guide, you'll learn how to set up Mailchimp campaigns for your marketplace.
If you haven’t gone through the introduction and the action/event article of our Zapier collection, we encourage you to do so to better understand how things work. If you want to dive straight into action either way, feel free to read on!
About Zapier
Zapier is a powerful and versatile tool that allows you to integrate different services to one another. You can learn more about Zapier in our introductory article or through this brief video from Zapier.
About Mailchimp
Mailchimp is a user-friendly platform that businesses use for sending emails to customers. It helps businesses create good-looking emails, manage their mailing lists, and see how well their emails are doing. With Mailchimp, businesses can easily reach out to their customers with personalized emails and keep track of how effective these emails are. And while Sharetribe does offer ways to manage emails within your marketplace, using Mailchimp for example for advertising can have its own benefits; it offers a wide feature set focused only on email campaigns.
What you need for this tutorial
External accounts
Zapier Account
Create a Zapier account if you don’t already have one. You can sign up at www.zapier.com.
During registration, Zapier may ask which apps you plan to use. You can enter Sharetribe at this point or add it later.
Mailchimp account
You can set this up at www.mailchimp.com
You can start with the free plan, and upgrade later if needed
How to set up your marketplace
Your marketplace must be configured in a certain way to support this Zap. Here is how you should set things up:
Recently created user account
This will be added to the Mailchimp audience in this tutorial
If there haven't been any recently created user accounts, go ahead and create one now!
With these pieces in place, let's get started!
Getting your Integration API key from Console
Navigate to Build > Advanced > Applications
Click on “+ Add a new application”
Give the application a descriptive name (like Zapier), and select ‘Integration API’.
Click ‘Add application’.
Important: Copy and paste the Client ID and Client secret to a safe place, like a password manager.
IMPORTANT: Think of the Client ID and Secret as a sort of a password to your marketplace that can be used to access your marketplace data through other services. Note that you won’t be able to ever see the Client secret to this application again in the Console under any circumstances. Make sure you copy it to a secure place. If you lose it, you will need to create a new application.
(Optional) Importing the Zap template
Go to www.zapier.com and log in with your account (or create a free one if you don't already have one).
Open the pre-made Zap for importing users to your Mailchimp audience here.
Click on "Try this Zap."
Creating the Zap, step by step
Go to www.zapier.com and log in with your account (or create a free one, if you don't already have one)
Select “+ Create Zap” from the left hand side menu
Select “1. Trigger” in the Zap creation screen, and find and select Sharetribe from the directory.
Step 1: Find the recently created user from your marketplace
Connect your Sharetribe account by entering your Client ID and Client secret
Click ‘Continue’ to move to the ‘Trigger’ section
Choose ‘User created’ as the ‘Event type’
Click ‘Continue’ to move to the ‘Test’ section
Test the trigger, and make sure it finds a recent user creation event with relevant user details
Click ‘Continue with the selected record’ to move to the next step
Step 2: Add user to Mailchimp audience
Select ‘Mailchimp’ as the app.
As the ‘Event’, find and select “Add/Update Subscriber”, and click Continue.
Now, you’ll need to connect your Mailchimp account. Click ‘Sign in’, and log in with your Mailchimp account. When you are ready, confirm the connection of the app in the pop-up window, and then click ‘Continue’.
Now, we’re going to fill in the details of the Mailchimp ‘Action’:
In ‘Audience’, choose the default audience (there should only be 1 option if this is a new Mailchimp account).
In ‘Subscriber email’, select ‘User Email’ from the drop-down list: this will have the email address of the user you located when doing the test zap. Since this is all the data we need, close the selector with the small ‘X’ and move to the next field.
(Optional) Select ‘False’ from the ‘Double Opt-In’ selector (unless you want to send a separate confirmation email to all new marketplace users for being added to your Mailchimp list).
(Optional) In ‘Update Existing’, select ‘Yes’.
(Optional) In ‘Replace Groups’, select ‘Add Only’.
(Optional) Fill any other fields according to your wishes.
Click ‘Continue’ at the bottom.
Now, the ‘Action’ details are complete. We’ll now do a test run, where the Trigger from part 1 (the marketplace user account’s email) is sent to Mailchimp. Click on ‘Test step’.
Click ‘Publish’. Congratulations, you’re now done, and all your new marketplace users will automatically be added to your Mailchimp audience!
Watch the video tutorial
You can watch a video tutorial about the creation of this Zap from this link.
Final thoughts
Thanks for reading this tutorial about creating a Zap for your Sharetribe marketplace to collect new users’ emails into Mailchimp! Feel free to read through other parts of our Zapier collection as well: this article is an introduction, while this one delves a bit into the technical details of what 'events' and 'actions' are in Zapier.
We also have a tutorial about integrating SMS message notifications to Sharetribe via Twilio, in case you're interested in SMS notifications!
Please get in touch with us from your Console or from the bottom right section of this page from the chat widget if you have any questions.