Connect Mailchimp to Airtable
Pull campaign performance, audience summaries and subscriber lists out of Mailchimp on a schedule. Opens, clicks, bounces and unsubscribes land as flat columns, ready to chart or join against revenue.
What you can pull from Mailchimp
Mailchimp exposes 3 objects you can pull, each as its own job. Every run pulls the records into a flat table, so nested fields arrive as ordinary columns that Airtable can sort, filter and total without further work.
Campaign reports
One row per sent campaign, with the opens, clicks, bounces and forwards blocks flattened into columns.
| Column | Type | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| id | string | The stable upsert key |
| campaign_title | string | — |
| subject_line | string | — |
| send_time | datetime | — |
| emails_sent | integer | — |
| open_rate | float | A fraction, not a percentage: 42% arrives as 0.42 |
| unique_opens | integer | — |
| clicks_total | integer | — |
| hard_bounces | integer | — |
| soft_bounces | integer | — |
| unsubscribed | integer | — |
Audience summaries
One row per audience - size, growth and engagement. Omit list_id for every audience at once.
Subscribers
Members of one audience, filtered by status. list_id is required.
Options you can set
- resource
- Which Mailchimp data to pull — defaults to
campaign_reports - since_send_time
- Only campaigns sent at or after this
- member_status
- subscribed, unsubscribed, cleaned, pending, transactional or all — defaults to
subscribed - max_members
- Cap on subscribers per run, up to 50,000 — defaults to
5000
How it lands in Airtable
Airtable accepts append, upsert writes. Upsert is the one that matters on a schedule: it merges on a key you choose, so matching rows are updated in place and only genuinely new records are created. Append instead, and a daily job multiplies your data.
Upsert merges on up to three key fields. Matching records are updated in place; only genuinely new rows are created.
- At most 3 merge fields - Airtable rejects more.
- Writes go 10 records per request, at 4 requests per second by default (Airtable’s own ceiling is 5) - roughly 2,400 records a minute.
- typecast is on by default, letting Airtable coerce strings into select, number and date fields rather than rejecting the write.
- unknown_fields defaults to error, so a renamed source column fails loudly instead of silently dropping data. Set it to skip if you would rather drop.
Authentication
You connect Mailchimp once through OAuth and the credential is stored server-side, never pasted into a cell or a formula. Only the scopes the connector actually calls are requested — the table below lists each one and what it is for.
Keeping runs incremental
Yes. since_send_time for campaigns, since_last_changed for subscribers, so a run fetches only what moved.
Pair a narrowed read with an upsert write and a re-run costs almost nothing: the rows it already knows are updated, and nothing is duplicated. That combination is what makes a frequent schedule affordable.
A worked example
Campaign performance next to the work
Upsert campaign reports on the campaign id, then link each row to the client it was sent for. Because stats keep moving for about 72 hours after send, upsert matters more here than for most sources.
Schedule: 0 8 * * * — read it back in plain English
Limits and pacing
These are the provider-side ceilings that shape a schedule, not ours. Knowing them up front is the difference between a job that runs quietly every morning and one that starts failing the week your data grows.
| Limit | Value | Applies to |
|---|---|---|
| Pages per run A safety net; each resource also stops on a short page. | 200 | Mailchimp |
Common gotchas
Most of what goes wrong with a scheduled sync is not a bug — it is a detail of how one side behaves that nobody wrote down. These are the ones that come up for this pair.
open_rate is a fraction
A 42% open rate arrives as 0.42. Store it as a percent field and let the destination format it, or multiply by 100 - but not both, or a client dashboard ends up reporting 4,200%.
Campaign stats keep moving after send
Opens and clicks trickle in for roughly 72 hours. Upsert on the campaign id so the row updates, rather than appending a new snapshot every run.
Some report blocks are deliberately excluded
industry_stats, list_stats, ab_split, ecommerce and delivery_status are outside the reporting scope, and timeseries/timewarp are lists of dicts that would break a tabular shape outright.
Do not key an upsert on email
People change their email address. When they do, upsert cannot match, so it creates a second record - the exact duplicate you were trying to prevent, plus a stale one. Use a stable ID from the source system.
The key field has to be written
If you restrict which columns get written and the key field is not among them, there is nothing to match on and every row is treated as new.
A row that is a fact per period needs a compound key
For a daily history, one row is one entity per day. Key on the entity alone and each day overwrites the last, leaving no history at all.
Set it up in four steps
- 1
Connect Mailchimp
Connect your Mailchimp account once. Mailchimp's API is per-account - each sits on its own datacenter endpoint - and the connection resolves that for you.
- 2
Connect Airtable
Connect your Airtable account once, then pick a base and table.
- 3
Shape the data
Select the columns you want, filter rows, cast types and add computed fields. Everything else is dropped before it reaches the destination.
- 4
Schedule it
Run once, or on a cron. Every run refreshes Airtable with the latest Mailchimp data.
Do I need an add-on or extension for this?
No. The job runs server-side and writes into Airtable through its API, so there is nothing installed in the destination itself. It keeps running when nobody has the file open, and a copy of the file does not need anything installed to work.
How often does the data refresh?
On whatever schedule you set with a cron expression — hourly, daily, or a specific time on specific days. Each run pulls the latest from Mailchimp.
Do I need to write any code?
No. You connect both sides, map the fields in a wizard and set a schedule. Computed fields accept small expressions — abs, round, min, max, len — but there is nothing to host or maintain.
Why is my open rate showing as 0.42?
Mailchimp returns rates as fractions. Format the destination column as a percent, or multiply by 100 - but not both, or the number comes out as 4,200%.
Can I pull more than one audience at once?
For audience summaries, yes - omit the list ID and you get one row per audience. Subscriber lists are per-audience and need a list ID.
How do I stop duplicate records appearing?
Use upsert rather than append, and key it on a stable identifier from the source. Append creates new records every run, so a daily job leaves seven copies of every row by the end of the week.
How fast can it write?
Airtable accepts 10 records per request, and writes are paced at 4 requests a second by default against a ceiling of 5 - roughly 2,400 records a minute. That is comfortable for thousands of rows and worth planning around for hundreds of thousands.
Is the Mailchimp connector free to use?
You can connect Mailchimp and start syncing on the free plan.
Other sources into Airtable
Related reading
Airtable upsert: stop creating duplicate records
Appending on every run turns a tidy base into six copies of every row. Here is how upsert works in Airtable, and how to choose a merge key that holds up.
Export Stripe data to Google Sheets
Stripe's dashboard exports are manual and stale the moment you download them. Here is how to keep customers, invoices and charges fresh in a sheet instead.
Import a CSV from a URL into Airtable
Point a job at a CSV link and it re-reads it on your schedule — no download, no manual import. Here is the setup, and the field-type trap to avoid first.