Move from Constant Contact
Export your Constant Contact contacts and unsubscribes, collect bounced addresses from your reports, rebuild your emails and automations, and remove self-authentication.
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This page takes you from Constant Contact to a working IGSendMail account. Contacts and unsubscribes take about 20 minutes; bounces take a little longer, because Constant Contact keeps them per campaign. Emails and automations take longer again, depending on how many you have.
Stuck on a step?
Reply to the email this guide came in, or write to us from the contact page. We answer migration questions by email, usually within a working day.
Export everything before you cancel
Constant Contact keeps export files for 7 days and only exports bounces from campaign reports. Do every export while your account is still open, and keep it running until your first IGSendMail campaign has gone out.
What comes across, and what doesn't#
| From Constant Contact | How it moves | Time |
|---|---|---|
| Contacts and their fields | Export a CSV, import it into a list | Minutes |
| Unsubscribed contacts | Filter by status, export, import into your Blacklist | Minutes |
| Bounced addresses | Export from each campaign's bounce report, import into your Blacklist | A few minutes per campaign |
| Custom-code emails | Copy your HTML, paste into a new template | A few minutes each |
| Drag-and-drop emails | Constant Contact doesn't export their HTML; rebuild | 15 to 60 minutes each |
| Automations | Can't be exported; rebuild each one | 20 to 60 minutes each |
Step 1: Set up your sending domain#
Go to Sending domains, add the domain you send from, and publish the DNS records it shows you. Authenticate your domain walks through each record.
If you self-authenticated your domain in Constant Contact, it added DKIM records pointing to ccsend.com. Once Constant Contact has sent its last email, turn it off under Settings > Advanced > Manage > Remove self-authentication, then delete those records. Keep your DMARC record, and check it still matches how you send.
Step 2: Export your contacts#
Turn on consent data (optional)
If you need each contact's permission status (for example for GDPR or Canada's CASL), turn on Advanced Email Permissions first; otherwise it isn't included in the export.
Select everyone and export
In Constant Contact, go to Contacts, choose Select all contacts, then Actions > Export selection. Tick every field you want to keep and click Export. To keep list membership, export each list separately instead: on Lists and segments, use the three-dot menu next to a list and choose Export.
Download the file
Go to Contacts, open the three-dot menu at the top right, choose View import/export activity, and download the CSV. It's there for 7 days.
Step 3: Import your contacts#
Create the list and its fields
Go to Lists and create a list. Add a field under ListsFields for each field you exported. If you exported lists separately and want to keep them apart, add a text field for the list name and fill it in each file before you import.
Import and map
Import the file (or each list's file) and map each column to its field. Import contacts covers the mapping screen, duplicates and the import summary.
Plan size
The Free plan holds 2,500 contacts. Every paid plan has unlimited contacts, so if your list is bigger than that, choose a paid plan before you import.
Step 4: Bring your unsubscribes and bounces across#
Unsubscribes. On the Contacts page, change All statuses to Unsubscribed, select all, and choose Actions > Export selection.
Bounces. Constant Contact has no bounced status on the Contacts page. Instead, go to Reporting > Emails, click the bounce number on a campaign, and choose Export Contacts. Do this for your recent campaigns, at least the last few months.
Then go to Blacklist and import each file. The Blacklist import reads the email address from the first column, so move the email column to the front first if it isn't there already.
Don't skip this. Emailing someone who unsubscribed from you on Constant Contact earns spam complaints and may break the law, and emailing addresses that bounced damages your sender reputation. Blacklisted addresses are never emailed, from any list. Blacklist and suppression explains how it works.
Step 5: Move your emails#
- Custom-code emails: you wrote the HTML, so copy it from the code editor and paste it into a new IGSendMail template using your own HTML.
- Drag-and-drop emails: Constant Contact doesn't make their HTML available. Rebuild them in the email builder, with a copy of the old email open beside you. Most newsletters are a header, a few content blocks and a footer, which takes about 15 minutes.
Then replace Constant Contact's merge tags. [[FirstName]] and [[FirstName or "Friend"]] won't work here; insert tags with the editor's personalization control, as described in Personalization tags. Check the footer has your unsubscribe link and postal address.
Step 6: Rebuild your automations#
Constant Contact's automated emails and automation paths can't be exported, so each one is rebuilt by hand. Before you start, open each one and write down (or screenshot):
- What starts it: joining a list, a birthday or anniversary, a contact's action.
- Each email and the delay before it. Copy each email's content.
- Any branches.
Then build it under Automations. Birthday and anniversary emails use a date trigger here; see Triggers and timing. Build a workflow covers the editor, and Welcome series is a worked example.
Switch each automation on here only when you switch the Constant Contact one off, so nobody gets the same email twice.
Step 7: Before your first send#
- Verify the list. Old lists always contain dead addresses. Run email verification before your first campaign.
- Start with your most engaged people. Your domain is new to our servers, so send to recent openers first and build up over a week or two. Warm up a new domain has a schedule.
- Replace your signup forms with an IGSendMail form, or new subscribers will keep landing in Constant Contact.
Last updated September 25, 2026