Welcome to a practical Zapier tutorial! In this guide, we’ll go through the process of connecting a Sharetribe marketplace to Mailchimp via a Zapier automation. 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!
What is 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.
What is 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 do you need for this tutorial?
You need a Mailchimp account, which you can create at www.mailchimp.com. You can use the Free plan for this purpose (you can upgrade later, if needed).
You will also need a Zapier account, which you can sign up for at www.zapier.com. When registering, the process may ask you which Zapier apps you want to use. You can already here enter and find ‘Sharetribe’ from the list of applications, but you can also add it later.
In order for Zapier to be able to draw relevant information from your marketplace, you will need to have some activity there. In this tutorial, we will be setting up a Zap that adds all new users that sign up on your marketplace to your Mailchimp subscriber list. It is enough that you have at least one user created on your marketplace recently, so Zapier will be able to find an event about user creation from your recent events. If there haven’t been any recent user account creations on your marketplace, go ahead and create one now.
You’ll also need to create an application using the Integration API. For the purposes of this tutorial, you don’t need to know details about using the APIs, but if you want, you can read about them from our technical documentation here.
With these pieces in place, let's get started!
Getting your Integration API key from Sharetribe 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.
Think of the Client ID and secret as a sort of a password to your marketplace that can be used 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.
Creating the Zap
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
Zapier has an AI-powered Zap generation function, in which you can describe your use case, and have it try to find the correct apps, triggers, and actions. We’ll skip it in this tutorial, so you can leave it empty, but you can try using it if you want.
Select “1. Trigger” in the Zap creation screen, and find and select Sharetribe from the directory.
In the “Event” selector, find and select “User events”, and click continue.
Now we’re in the ‘Account’ section. Here, you will enter the Client ID and secret that you created earlier. Connect your Sharetribe marketplace by entering the ID and secret in the pop up window that appears. Click Continue.
In the “Event type” selector, choose “User created”. Click Continue.
Now we’ve set up all the properties for the Trigger. Click ‘Test trigger’ to see if it works. Note that it will try to find a recently created user from your marketplace for this test. If it fails to find one, go back to your marketplace, and create a new user through the marketplace’s own web interface (i.e., not in the Console).
If you find “User event A” (and potentially others) with the test, and you can see this user’s information such as their email address, well done! This part is now over. Click “Continue with the selected record”.
Now, we will need to choose an Action for this trigger. Here, find and choose Mailchimp from the available services.
In the ‘Event’ selector, 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!
Use a template
You can also access a pre-made Zap template directly, if you want. You can find it here. This template has the steps already configured, but still requires that you connect your own credentials (Integration API keys) and events to set it up.
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.