Marketing

Connect your mailing list

CBSMembers connects directly to MailChimp. Paste in an API key, choose which audience to sync, and your member data and your mailing list stay aligned. The key is stored encrypted and never shown again — and because the integration is built to be provider-neutral, other email services can be added in future without changing how you work.

One society, one connection, one place to manage it all — no exporting CSVs, no uploading them by hand, no wondering whether the two lists have drifted apart.

Segments that keep themselves up to date

A tag is a segment of your audience — "Newsletter", "Active members", "Lapsed over a year". Each tag is defined by a saved query against your membership, so membership is automatic: add a member, and the query includes them on the next sync; the day they no longer qualify, they drop out. You never hand-curate a list again.

And not everyone on a mailing list is a member. Newsletter sign-ups, supporters and ex-members are first-class too: manage them as non-member contacts and tag them alongside your members, all in the same audience. Both members and non-members sit in a clean, searchable list with a status breakdown at a glance, so a few hundred contacts are as easy to work through as a few dozen.

Two-way, by design

CBSMembers owns who your members are; your email service owns who has unsubscribed. So the sync runs in two clear directions:

• Push sends your members and their tags out to MailChimp.
• Fetch brings subscribe-statuses — crucially, unsubscribes — back in, so the app always knows who has opted out.

Contacts that arrive from MailChimp under a different or old email are matched back to the right member with name suggestions, so you never end up with duplicate phantom records. Fetched sign-ups can be confirmed in bulk, and a built-in tag manager clears out stray labels left behind by old spreadsheet imports — so the audience stays tidy on both sides.

Compliance built in

Marketing is kept strictly separate from your transactional post. A marketing unsubscribe can never stop a member receiving a statement, a dividend letter or an AGM notice — the two are different channels by construction.

An opt-out is permanent and respected: the app only ever adds a contact to your audience, so it can't resubscribe someone who has unsubscribed — and that suppression survives a member being re-added, an email change, or even being deleted. Where a society requires explicit consent, MailChimp's own double-opt-in can be switched on per connection.