Airtable Twoooo-Waaaay Sync with MailChimp / Email Marketing

[M_L]

I’m looking for help with integrations:

My nonprofit uses Airtable heavily to track lists of people and their contact information. We also use MailChimp to send out updates to our partners, newsletter subscribers, etc. using that contact information. My question is this:

Is there a simple way to establish a “Two-Way Sync” between Airtable and MailChimp so that they will always contain the same data, regardless of changes made on either side?

I need a true “sync” that will:

1. Update MailChimp with any changes entered in Airtable (add, remove, edit), and
2. Update Airtable with any changes entered in MailChimp (subscribe, remove, edit).

I’d rather pay a small fee per month for an established app to do this than build it in Zapier/Make, but either way is fine if it works.

TIA,
M

p.s. If you know of a fix for this with an email marketing program other than MailChimp, please let me know.

p.p.s. As of today’s writing, Outfunnel can do most but not all of this (like adding un/subscribes to Airtable).

[Andres_at_Conne]

What do you change in Mailchimp, and what do you change in Airtable? Any field? Or just name/last name in one, tags in the other?

[M_L]

I’d like to assume that all of the shared fields could be changed. Name, email address, street address, phone #, MailChimp Group/Tag, Custom Fields, etc.

I say that because 1) we want to manage all of our data from within Airtable and use MailChimp only for Email Distribution, but 2) MailChimp will also input/edit these fields whenever someone Joins or Unsubscribes from our mailing list through an embedded form or unsubscribe link.

TIA for your help,
M

[Andres_at_Conne]

If you create in one place and edit on another then the sync is relatively easy. Otherwise, 2 way sync are very difficult to build and manage

[M_L]

Hi Andres,

Thanks for the response. It makes sense that a two way sync could be complicated. Perhaps it’s worth “zooming out” on the problem if there’s not a good way to accomplish that specifically:

We are established in Airtable for many areas of our operations, but we need a good option to integrate our contact lists from Airtable with an Email Marketing solution. Do you know of other ways to do this? For example:

1. Is there a Email Marketing solution other than MailChimp that does allow for two-way sync? We could then use this app to send our newsletters, but manage the lists from Airtable.

OR maybe a better question is:

2) Is there a good way to move all of these functions to Airtable? This would include “subscribe forms” embedded in our website, and “unsubscribe links” at the bottom of our newsletters, which are curently handled by MailChimp. If Airtable could do these things instead of MailChimp, then I believe we could make Airtable the “one place” for creating and editing data. I don’t want to manage user data from the Email Marketing solution (e.g., MailChimp, etc.), so this seems to be the only solution in that vein.

TIA,
M

[Andres_at_Conne · Accepted solution]

Yeah, working from 1 single app is a good practice.

You’ll need to go app by app and check if they have an Airtable native integration.

For eg: I’m not sure if this works, but Sendgrid claims to integrate with AT Airtable - SendGrid

Others claim too, but using Zapier.

Whalesync is implementing a sync, but soon to be published. Worth connecting with them https://www.whalesync.com/

[M_L]

Hi Andres,

This is very helpful. It sounds like these native integrations could either do two-way sync, or enable me to do one-way sync with Airtable doing all of the edits/changes/subscribes/unsubscribes. I’ll check them out.

Thank you,
M

[MichaelTomar]

Try the Skyvia app. It can integrate Airtable and Mailchimp without coding. Read more here.

[EdersonManoel]

You can use IFTTT for this https://ifttt.com/connect/airtable/mailchimp

[ScottWorld]

Sorry that I’m late to this thread here, but as others have mentioned, it's possible that WhaleSync might be of help here.

Outside of a dedicated app like WhaleSync that has committed itself to 2-way syncing, there isn't a "simple way" of doing a 2-way sync between Airtable and Mailchimp.

I’ve actually created this exact same thing for one of my clients using Make's Mailchimp integrations and Make's Airtable integrations. But again, it's not simple — it does take quite a bit of time to setup.

If you’ve never used Make before, I’ve assembled a bunch of Make training resources in this thread.

Hope this helps! If you’d like to hire an expert Airtable consultant to help you with anything Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld