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I have a Zap that connects HubSpot and MailChimp.

What I want to do: When I update email address for contact in HubSpot, I want the Zap to update the email address for that person in MailChimp.

What’s happening: Right now when I update the email address of a contact in HubSpot it’s always creating a new contact in MailChimp. It won’t update the email address of the contacts in MailChimp.

So I know Zap is connected and working. 

But, how do I get the Zap to update contact email addresses in MailChimp?

I really don’t need the Zap to create new contacts in MailChimp as I have subscription forms for that. 

If you’re asking why this solution - our nonprofit uses HubSpot as our main database. We flow updates from our donation software into HubSpot. When the donation software (which doesn’t have a Zap option) sends data to HubSpot that includes a new email address for an existing contact in HubSpot, I want the Zap to send the updated email address for that contact to MailChimp and update the email address; keeping our MailChimp contacts updated.

Any help greatly appreciated. 

Screenshots of setup:

 

Hi @dmuser!

The MailChimp step is creating new contacts because it’s looking for the email address you’re sending (the new one) and can’t find it, so it thinks it needs to make a new contact. I find that a good way to think about MailChimp is that the email address is subscribed to a list, not the person. 

There are two challenging parts to this task 1) having the previous email address so MailChimp knows what to look for and 2) The MailChimp integration doesn’t allow you to update an email address; you would have to delete and resubscribe the contact with their new email address. 

 

Issue 1 - having the previous email address

You can get around this is to add a custom field in HubSpot called ‘Previous email address’, and when you update a contact’s email address, put their old one into that field. When the Zap is triggered and you get the custom field information, you’ll know what email address was previously in Help Scout. 

 

Issue 2 - you can’t update email addresses in MailChimp

There isn’t a clean way of handling this, unfortunately. If it were me, set up a Zap that added a new subscriber (using the updated email address) and then use the Unsubscribe Email action to unsubscribe (and delete, if you want to) the old email address. So, your Zap would look like this:

 

  1. Trigger: New or updated contact in Hubspot
  2. MailChimp - Add or update subscriber
  3. MailChimp - Unsubscribe Email

 

​I hope that's clear, please let us know if you have any questions!

Ah, this is helpful. Let me mess around with it for a bit and I’ll either update you on how it worked or ask questions. Thank you so much.

@Danvers 

It worked like a charm. Thank you for your solution and your time. If I have anymore questions, I'll reach out.

Awesome! I’m glad that it solved the problem and great work setting it up 🙌🏻

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