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Setting Up Airtable MailChimp Integration: 2 Easy Steps

Aditya Jadon • Last Modified: December 29th, 2022

Managing Marketing Campaigns is a hectic process when we need to synchronize Database changes with E-Mail list updates. Airtable MailChimp Integration is a comprehensive linking of 2 tools that help make your Marketing smarter and efficient. Airtable handles all your Databases in a user-friendly spreadsheet-like graphical interface while MailChimp is the best service for bulk market mailing and managing all your Marketing Campaigns.

Your customer data stored in the Airtable Database is vital to grow your business. Whether you want to use an existing E-Mail list or you want to create one, you need various strategies and testing practices that can help you to integrate Airtable and MailChimp.

This article will give you a step-by-step process in setting up Airtable MailChimp Integration. It also provides a brief overview of both Airtable and MailChimp so that you can understand both technologies thoroughly. Furthermore, it also highlights a few limitations of this process. Read along to find out how you can set up Airtable MailChimp Integration for your organization.

Table of Contents

Prerequisites

Before setting up Airtable Mailchimp Integration, you need to ensure that you take care of the following Prerequisites:

  • An Airtable Account with Data regarding E-Mails.
  • An Active MailChimp account.

Introduction to Airtable

Airtable Logo
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Airtable is a non-scripting Relational Database that has a similar structure to Spreadsheets and is known as a Spreadsheet Database Hybrid tool. Databases are generally avoided because not everyone has a strong technical knowledge of SQL. Visualizing rows and columns in Spreadsheets makes tasks easier to the point where Spreadsheet’s limitations become a requirement to accomplish a task.

It is challenging for Spreadsheets to define relationships between multiple tables and implement Data Structures and Algorithms between these tables. Airtable encompasses the advantages of Databases and Spreadsheets, all in one package. Airtable is a versatile tool that can add a single text field or define action triggers using buttons.

Airtable comes with several views that help you visualize data in various formats depending on the use case. Tables can be formatted into a calendar based on time, into Kanban boards based on cards, into grid tables based on custom forms, etc. Airtable makes it easy to integrate numerous apps and scripts to perform additional actions into a Database such as Pivoting, Converting URLs to attachments, Importing data from Jira Cloud, Salesforce, CSV, etc.

To learn more about Airtable, click here.

Introduction to MailChimp

MailChimp Logo
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MailChimp is an E-Mail Marketing platform that manages bulk mail, newsletters, and custom templates for your list of audiences. You can send 20 emails via Gmail or Yahoo, but one should have a good bulk mail service to grow an audience. Fortunately, MailChimp covers all the needs to send newsletters to subscribers. E-Mail Marketing is essential for digital businesses to stay in touch with their customers.

MailChimp allows you to easily segment your subscriber list, run Analytics and test your audience. Automating Triggers makes MailChimp more attractive because you can define what should happen if a new subscriber is added or if someone is added to a mailing list.

To learn more about MailChimp, click here.

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Steps to Set Up Airtable MailChimp Integration

Now that you have understood both Airtable and MailChimp, this section will discuss how you can set up Airtable MailChimp Integration for your organization. You can do this by following the below steps:

Step 1: Exporting Your Airtable Data to a CSV File

In this section, you will go through the process of how to export Airtable Data to a CSV format. This process may take time based on the size of the database.

  1. First, you have to log in to your Airtable account.
  2. Select the Grid view export to CSV format.
Image of Airtable to Download CSV
Image Source: Self
  1. In case you do not want to export a lot of columns, you can hide them by clicking on Hide Fields.
  2. Click on the three-dotted drop-down menu.
  3. Next click on the Download CSV option.
  4. The downloaded file will save to the default location in your local machine

Step 2: Importing the Airtable CSV File into MailChimp

Now, this part of Airtable MailChimp will guide you through the steps to import CSV from Airtable to MailChimp. Also, provide you details to organize the CSV file accordingly.

  1. Login to your MailChimp account.
  2. On the left side of the page, Select the Audience option from Sidebar Navigation as shown below.
MailChimp Page Sidebar
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  1. Click on the Audience Dashboard option as shown in the below image.

Image of Airtable to Download CSV
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  1. Select Audience in case you have multiple audiences.
  2. On the right side of the page, choose Import Contacts from the Manage Audience drop-down menu.
Image to List Manage Audience
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Image of Drop Down Menu to Select Import Contacts
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  1. Select the Upload File option as shown below.
Image to Upload Airtable CSV File
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  1. Click on Continue to Upload.
  2. Click Browse to upload CSV from Airatable to MailChimp as shown below.
Image to Import Airtable CSV File to MailChimp
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  1. Locate and upload the downloaded CSV from Airtable.
  2. Click the Continue to Organize button.
  3. If you have more than one audience, then select an Audience to which you want to import contacts from the provided drop-down menu as shown below.
Image to Select an Audience
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  1. Select a status from the drop-down to be marked with importing contacts as shown below.
Image to Select a Status
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  1. If the Audience has groups in it then you can select the group of your choice. Check the box for each group in the Select groups.
  2. Next, click the Continue to Tag button.
Image of Continue to Tag Button
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  1. Create a tag or select it from the drop-down menu if you want to assign any tags to Airtable MailChimp imported contacts as shown below. It’s an optional step if the user wants to assign tags to all of the contacts.
Image to Search or Create Tags
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  1. Click on the Continue To Match as shown below.
Image of Continue To Match Button
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  1. MailChimp follows certain Format guidelines, so make sure that you match your unmatched columns with the labels in the Airtable MailChimp CSV file.
Match Column Labels to Contact Information
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  1. Click on the Finalize Import button.
Finalize Import Button Image
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  1. Review all the changes and then click on the Complete Import button.
Complete Import Button Image
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That’s it! You have successfully set up Airtable MailChimp Integration for your organization! Now you can manage your Marketing Campaigns effectively.

Limitations of the Manual Airtable MailChimp Integration

There are few limitations to the discussed process of Airtable MailChimp that makes every step of the process tedious as the audience increases rapidly. Manual work would consume time and eventually make it hard to manage in the following ways:

  • Spreadsheets cannot manage the relationship between tables. So each table in the Airtable base needs to be exported in a different CSV format.
  • Only 1 Status (Subscribed, Unsubscribed, etc.) can be selected for a CSV format while importing MailChimp Airtable contacts.
  • You have to manually edit the table labels for each CSV file with the format guidelines of MailChimp.
  • You have to frequently follow the above process to update data on Airtable Database and MailChimp.
  • To import a huge volume of audience data via Airtable MailChimp CSV format, it may take time to load.

Conclusion

This article provided a step-by-step guide to set up Airtable MailChimp Integration. It also gave a brief overview of both technologies and highlighted a few limitations of this process. To grow your business, you should have good hands-on Marketing. All data stored in the Database can help you to send newsletters to an E-Mail list. MailChimp uses this data effectively to market your business to the target audience.

To resolve the manual process automating the data flow would be the optimal solution. There are many third-party tools available on the internet that can help automate the process of flow of data from Airtable to MailChimp and vice versa. So whenever any subscriber is added to your mailing list it will automatically create a new record in Airtable Database or archive Airtable MailChimp campaigns. 

Automating your Marketing Campaigns comes in handy as your business expands. Hevo Data is a No-code Data Pipeline solution that can help you transfer data from 100+ data sources. It is a user-friendly, secure and reliable way to send data from MailChimp to any of your data warehouses. Hevo fully automates the process of loading data from multiple sources and transforming it into analysis-ready form without writing a single line of code. Try Hevo by signing up for a 14-day free trial and see the difference!

Share your experience of learning about the Airtable MailChimp Integration in the comments section below!

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