I want to make a Zap for when a new Video is published to my YouTube channel to send an email announcing my new video using MailChimo or ActiveCampaign.
Using the built in Zap templates I can’t figure out how to pass the URL, title and description to either MailChimp or ActiveCampaign so that the email body has the video and description in the body.
The closest I could get was making a campaign from a template and setting the campaign name but not passing these values to be inserted into the emulate body.
Best answer by XRay Tech
@ David Berman
The Email Content field in the Create Campaign step accepts HTML so you can format it in any way you want. You can also go to the templates you have made in MailChimp and export the HTML. You can then copy it into the Email Content field and put the Youtube variables where you need them.
To embed the YouTube video rather than just sharing the link (some email clients will auto-expand the links anyway) you can copy the code here: http://www.simplehtmlguide.com/youtube.php and just paste the YouTube URL variable from the trigger step into the HTML code.
This is a great question! There might not be a template to do the task you need, but Zapier is still the perfect platform to accomplish exactly what you’ve requested!
First you want to start a Zap with Youtube as the trigger app and choose New Video in Channel for the Trigger Event:
Then connect your Youtube account and find your Channel ID. This will be in the Youtube URL when you navigated to your Youtube channel. For instance, our Youtube URL looks like this: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXu3C3P6ZbpwehPqpZSFYSw
And you add that Channel ID into the “Set up trigger” step like this:
This next step may be the key you’re missing! You need to first “Create Campaign” in MailChimp. This will allow you to make a Draft where you can populate the data from the Youtube video into the Email and select which Audience receives the Email.
Finally you’ll choose the “Send Campaign” event for Step 3. When it asks which Campaign choose Custom and select the ID from the Campaign you created in Step 2.
Just like that you’ve got a Zap to send out an Email Campaign every time you upload a new video to your channel!
Thanks a lot XRay. This is as far as I got, but where I got stuck is getting the YouTube video URL and description in the email body. It looks like this Zap is going to send an email with just the URL and description which, is a step, but I would like to use the nice email design I can make in MailChimp and pass the url as an input parameter that is filling in a placeholder value in the email body so we have a nice html email. Is that possible?
I’m not trying to include recipient information in the email body. I am trying to have the video appear in the email body and the video description as well.
The Email Content field in the Create Campaign step accepts HTML so you can format it in any way you want. You can also go to the templates you have made in MailChimp and export the HTML. You can then copy it into the Email Content field and put the Youtube variables where you need them.
To embed the YouTube video rather than just sharing the link (some email clients will auto-expand the links anyway) you can copy the code here: http://www.simplehtmlguide.com/youtube.php and just paste the YouTube URL variable from the trigger step into the HTML code.
