Syncing with Your Email Platform

If you already send email through Mailchimp, MailerLite, Campaign Monitor, or Email Octopus, you don't have to move. Connect the platform to ContactDrive and the two stay in step.

All four apps work the same way, so this page covers the shared behavior and each app's own page covers its specifics.

What the sync does

It runs in both directions:

Push — your ContactDrive contacts go into the audience, list, or group you nominate on the email platform.
Pull — that audience's subscribers come back into ContactDrive, and their engagement lands on contact timelines as activity.

That second half is the point. Opens, clicks, bounces, and unsubscribes stop living in a separate tool and become part of each person's history, alongside their donations, tasks, and calls.

Setting one up

Add the app from the Apps marketplace.
Open its Settings.
Paste your API key from the email platform. It's stored encrypted, and it's validated on save — if the platform rejects it, the save fails rather than quietly saving a bad key.
Choose the audience, list, or group to sync with.
Pick a refresh schedule.
Save.

You can also trigger a sync manually rather than waiting for the schedule.

Unsubscribes and suppression

Unsubscribes flow back to ContactDrive and land on Suppressed Contacts, with the reason recorded and the platform named.

This is where the "Do Not Email" gotcha bites, and it's worth knowing before it confuses you: clearing the Do Not Email checkbox on a contact record does not record consent. The email platform still has that person unsubscribed, so your next sync leaves them out. To genuinely re-subscribe somebody who asked, re-activate them from Suppressed Contacts — that records the consent and lets the sync add them back.

When a sync stops working

Two problems disable a scheduled sync rather than letting it fail quietly, and every admin is notified:

The API key is invalid or was revoked. Generate a new key on the platform and save it in the app's settings.
The list you configured no longer exists. Someone deleted it, or the ID is wrong. Pick a valid list and save.

The notification tells you which of the two it is, so you're not checking a working API key when the actual problem is a deleted list.

Both cases cancel the schedule deliberately. A sync that swallowed the error would keep reporting success while syncing nothing — the integration would look healthy for months and you'd never know. Better to stop and say so.

Saving valid settings clears the error and restarts the schedule.

Which one should I use?

Whichever you already send with. If you don't send anywhere yet and are choosing fresh, look at Email Marketing instead — it sends from your own domain without a third platform in the loop.

Using the Mailchimp App
Using the MailerLite App
Using the Campaign Monitor App
Using the Email Octopus App
Suppressed Contacts