6 ways to automate Mailchimp with Zapier

Any newsletter worth its salt, one that grips readers and converts them into paying customers, takes effort to put together. And delivering snazzy newsletter content at a regular cadence is no small feat, either. Mailchimp is a household name in email marketing that makes the process easier, whether you're new or a seasoned pro. 

And when you connect Mailchimp to Zapier, you can automate the busywork that keeps you from focusing on crafting your best content: tasks like auto-subscribing new leads to your newsletter, or instantly updating your CRM with every fresh subscription.

Sound interesting? Then check out these six ways to automate Mailchimp with Zapier—complete with ready-to-use Zap templates and tips for incorporating AI.

Table of contents

• Subscribe leads to your newsletter

• Turn your campaigns into content

• Keep a backup of your email list

• Engage event attendees with your newsletter

• Connect Mailchimp with your CRM

• Connect Mailchimp to almost any app with webhooks

Subscribe leads to your newsletter

When people are interested in learning about your product or service, you want to capitalize on that interest right away. With a simple Zap, you can eliminate the time it takes to copy and paste contact information (or export CSV files) altogether. 

Try any of the below workflows, which will automatically add a new lead—from emails to form submissions and even spreadsheets—as a subscriber in Mailchimp. No matter where you find leads or how you add them to Mailchimp, these Zaps can take care of importing that information instantly. That way, you can focus on building effective email journeys without worrying whether any new leads are falling through the cracks.

From inbound leads

From spreadsheets and databases

From form submissions

Turn your campaigns into content

Repurposing content is a content marketer's dream. You spend all of that time crafting the perfect email, so why not use it again on your website or social media to get more eyeballs on it? The Zaps below will automatically create a new post on your site when you send a new campaign.

If you want to maintain a sense of exclusivity for your newsletter subscribers, add a delay step—available on our paid plans—so your new posts will publish a certain amount of time after the initial campaign is sent.

Keep a backup of your email list

It's always a good idea to store your most essential business information in multiple places so you don't risk losing it. And while Mailchimp is a great tool for managing your audience and building powerful email campaigns, there are some things only a spreadsheet can achieve. Storing your email list in a spreadsheet gives you much more granular control over how you visualize, organize, and analyze your email marketing performance. 

This Zap helps ensure every new Mailchimp subscriber is added to your Google Sheet so your backup is always accurate and up to date.

Engage event attendees with your newsletter

Events are expensive, but a great way to engage potential and existing customers. Even webinars, while cost-effective, are labor-intensive.

You'll want to make that effort worth it by keeping your attendees engaged with your business, long after your event or webinar is over. Your newsletter is the perfect way to do just that.

Use a Zap to automatically add attendees to your email list. You won't have to worry about managing your email signups and can instead focus on putting on a successful event.

Pro tip: While it's a time-saver to automatically add all event attendees to your email list, you'll want to customize the workflow to keep your Mailchimp contact list clean and clutter-free. For example, a filter step can stop your mom from being added just because she invited you to a family catch-up on Zoom.

Or, a paths step can use conditional logic to add different attendees to different audience segments depending on if, say, they signed up for the enterprise sales strategies webinar you're hosting or a leadership summit. 

Connect Mailchimp with your CRM

Customer relationship manager (CRM) apps are often the source of truth for businesses. If something is incorrect in the CRM, it can throw your operation out of whack. When you have a lot of changes coming in at once, it can be difficult to capture every single email list update in your CRM.

Conversely, every new lead in your CRM should be added to your email list so they can be nurtured with timely email campaigns. It's important to connect your CRM with your email marketing software so that your contact lists stay in sync and maximally effective.

Rather than waiting for a one-time download of subscribers and importing the data from your CRM to Mailchimp or vice versa, use one of these Zaps to connect your marketing and sales tools.

Pro tip: If you set up two Zaps connecting Mailchimp and your CRM in both directions, be sure to add a filter step to avoid a Zap loop. 

You can even add AI into the mix to level-up your CRM/Mailchimp connection even more. For example, this Zap uses ChatGPT to draft messages and update Mailchimp profiles for newly churned accounts.

Connect Mailchimp to almost any app with webhooks

Zapier integrates with thousands of apps, but that doesn't mean you're guaranteed to find the app you're looking for in the app directory. What if the app you want to connect to Mailchimp doesn't integrate with Zapier? In that case, you can use Webhooks by Zapier to connect Mailchimp to almost any app.

Webhooks are a way to send information from one app to another based on a trigger. For instance, you might create new Mailchimp subscribers from submissions in your obscure form builder. Or, whenever you get a new subscriber in Mailchimp, your webhook can send that data to your custom CRM or database tool. Use one of these Zaps to get started.

Take your email marketing to the next level

This is just the start of all that you can do with Mailchimp and Zapier. Zapier supports thousands of apps, so you automate almost any task at work. Start building your Zap now and see what you can create.

This article was published in September 2020 by Krystina Martinez, with previous updates by Elena Alston and Nicole Replogle. It was most recently updated in December 2025 by Steph Spector.