BAEZ TECH SOLUTIONS

Overview

A membership community running on Circle needed Mailchimp to always reflect the true, current membership status of every contact—without relying on Stripe or PayAdvantage and without creating a mess of overlapping tags.

I built an automation that keeps Mailchimp perfectly in sync with Circle so each contact always has exactly one membership-state tag: TRIAL, ACTIVE, or CANCELLED.

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What the customer wanted

• Use Circle as the single source of truth for membership status.
• Keep Mailchimp clean and reliable so:
  • Every member has one and only one membership-state tag at any time.
  • Historical or informational tags (like “Legacy Member”) are not touched.
• Automatically keep Mailchimp updated as people:
  • Start a trial in Circle
  • Convert to paid, or
  • Lose access / cancel
• Make the automation idempotent – safe to re-run without breaking data or stacking tags.

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What I built

I implemented a Circle → Mailchimp automation that:

• Watches current access in Circle (spaces/paywalls) to determine real membership state.
• Updates a member’s Mailchimp profile so they always have exactly one of these tags:
  • FT-MEMBER-TRIAL
  • FT-MEMBER-ACTIVE
  • FT-MEMBER-CANCELLED
• Cleans up any conflicting or outdated state tags, while leaving other non-state tags alone (e.g. sign-up tags, legacy flags).
• Handles legacy PayAdvantage members by looking only at whether they currently have paid access in Circle, not their payment method.

The result is a stable, self-correcting sync between Circle and Mailchimp where Circle is the only source of truth.

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How the automation works

1. Determine the true state from Circle

For each member, the automation checks current Circle access:

• ACTIVE
  • Has paid access to the Circle spaces/paywalls (including legacy PayAdvantage payers).
• TRIAL
  • Is in an active trial in Circle and has not yet converted.
• CANCELLED
  • No longer has paid access in Circle (trial ended without conversion or paid access removed).

No decisions are made based on Stripe, PayAdvantage, or existing Mailchimp tags. Those systems and tags are treated as non-authoritative for state.

2. Enforce a single membership-state tag in Mailchimp

Depending on the Circle state, the automation updates Mailchimp as follows:

• When a member is ACTIVE
  • Add: FT-MEMBER-ACTIVE
  • Remove: FT-MEMBER-TRIAL, FT-MEMBER-CANCELLED
• When a member is TRIAL
  • Add: FT-MEMBER-TRIAL
  • Remove: FT-MEMBER-ACTIVE, FT-MEMBER-CANCELLED
• When a member is CANCELLED
  • Add: FT-MEMBER-CANCELLED
  • Remove: FT-MEMBER-ACTIVE, FT-MEMBER-TRIAL

This guarantees there is no tag stacking and that membership state is always unambiguous for segmentation.

3. Respect other, non-state tags

Tags like FT-MEMBER-SIGN-UP, Legacy Member, or other marketing/behavior tags are:

• Left untouched
• Not used as inputs to determine state

This keeps marketing history and nuanced segmentation available without interfering with the clean state model.

4. Idempotent, safe-to-rerun logic

The automation is designed to be idempotent:

• If a zap or workflow re-runs on the same member, it simply re-applies the correct state based on Circle.
• Re-applying the same tag and re-removing others is safe and does not create duplicates or conflicting tags.

This makes the system resilient to retries, webhook replays, and manual re-runs during troubleshooting.

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Cleanup pass for existing contacts

As part of implementation, the workflow also supports a one-time cleanup of existing Mailchimp contacts:

1. Pull the list of current Circle members.
2. For each person, check their access in Circle to determine whether they are TRIAL, ACTIVE, or CANCELLED.
3. Remove any conflicting membership-state tags in Mailchimp.
4. Apply exactly one correct state tag per contact.

After this cleanup, ongoing automation keeps everything accurate going forward.

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Tools used

• Circle – membership community and access control (source of truth).
• Mailchimp – email marketing platform and tagging engine.
• Zapier (or equivalent iPaaS) – automation layer to:
  • Listen to changes in Circle
  • Transform that into a normalized state
  • Apply the correct tags in Mailchimp in an idempotent way

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Results & benefits

• Single source of truth: Circle fully owns membership status; Mailchimp simply mirrors it.
• Clean segmentation: Each contact has exactly one state tag, making it easy to build audiences like “Active members,” “On trial,” and “Cancelled” without guesswork.
• Less manual cleanup: No need to hand-fix overlapping tags or mystery states inside Mailchimp.
• Resilient automation: Idempotent logic means retries and re-runs are safe, reducing risk and maintenance effort.