Move from Mailchimp
Export your Mailchimp audience, bring your contacts and your unsubscribes across, move your templates and rebuild your automations, in about an hour for a typical account.
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This page takes you from a Mailchimp account to a working IGSendMail account. Contacts and unsubscribes take about 15 minutes. Templates and automations take longer, depending on how many you have. Nothing here needs a developer.
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.
Do it in this order
Set up your sending domain first, because DNS changes can take a few hours to show up and you can import while you wait. Keep Mailchimp running until your first IGSendMail campaign has gone out, so there's never a gap.
What comes across, and what doesn't#
| From Mailchimp | How it moves | Time |
|---|---|---|
| Subscribed contacts, with names and other fields | Export a CSV, import it into a list | Minutes |
| Unsubscribed and cleaned (bounced) addresses | Export a CSV, import it into your Blacklist | Minutes |
| Tags | Come across as a column; keep them as a field | Minutes |
| Custom-coded templates | Export as HTML, paste into a new template | A few minutes each |
| Drag-and-drop templates | Mailchimp can't export these; copy the HTML of a sent campaign, or rebuild | 15 to 60 minutes each |
| Automations (Customer Journeys) | No platform exports these; rebuild each one | 20 to 60 minutes each |
| Open and click history, campaign reports | Not transferable | Download reports you want to keep |
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 your domain already has an SPF record for Mailchimp, don't add a second one. A domain may only have one SPF record, so add our include to the existing record instead.
Step 2: Export your audience from Mailchimp#
Open your audience
In Mailchimp, go to Audience. If you have more than one audience, choose the one you're moving. You need to be an Owner or Admin on the Mailchimp account to export.
Export it
Click Export audience, then Export CSV. Mailchimp emails you when the file is ready, and the download stays available for 30 days.
Unzip the download
You'll get a ZIP containing separate CSV files for subscribed, unsubscribed, non-subscribed and cleaned contacts. Each file is used differently below, so keep them apart.
Repeat for each audience you're moving. One Mailchimp audience becomes one IGSendMail list.
Step 3: Import your subscribed contacts#
Create the list and its fields
Go to Lists and create a list. Then add a field under ListsFields for anything you want to keep beyond name and email: phone, company, birthday, and a text field called Tags if you use Mailchimp tags.
Import the subscribed file
Open the list and import the subscribed CSV. Map Email Address to email, First Name and Last Name to the name fields, TAGS to your Tags field, and anything else you created a field for. Columns you don't need, such as MEMBER_RATING or LEID, can stay unmapped.
Check the result
Compare the imported count with the number of rows in the file. Import contacts explains the summary and what to do with rejected rows.
Once your tags are in a field, you can build segments on them, for example "Tags contains customer".
Plan size
The Free plan holds 2,500 contacts. Every paid plan has unlimited contacts, so if your subscribed file is bigger than that, choose a paid plan before you import.
Step 4: Bring your unsubscribes across#
This is the step people skip, and it's the one that matters most. If someone unsubscribed from you on Mailchimp and you email them again from IGSendMail, you'll get spam complaints, and you may be breaking the law.
Go to Blacklist and import the unsubscribed CSV. Then import the cleaned CSV the same way; those are addresses that bounced, and sending to them again hurts your reputation. You can upload Mailchimp's files as they are, because the Blacklist import reads the email address from the first column.
Addresses on the Blacklist are never emailed, from any list. Blacklist and suppression explains how it works.
Leave the non-subscribed file out. Those people never opted in to your emails.
Step 5: Move your templates#
Custom-coded templates. In Mailchimp, open Campaigns > Email templates, choose the template, open More options and export it as HTML. In IGSendMail, create a new template, choose your own HTML, and paste it in.
Drag-and-drop templates. Mailchimp doesn't export these. Two options:
- Copy a sent campaign. Open a campaign that used the template, open its "view in browser" link, view the page source and copy it. Paste it into a new HTML template, then delete Mailchimp's footer and badge.
- Rebuild it. Most newsletters are a header, a few content blocks and a footer. The email builder usually gets you there in 15 minutes, and the result is easier to edit later.
Either way, replace Mailchimp's merge tags. *|FNAME|* won't work here; insert tags with the editor's personalization control instead, as described in Personalization tags. Also check the footer has your unsubscribe link and postal address.
Step 6: Rebuild your automations#
Mailchimp's Customer Journeys can't be exported by any platform, so each one is rebuilt by hand. Before you start, open each journey in Mailchimp and write down three things:
- What starts it: a signup, a tag, a date.
- Each email and the wait before it. Copy each email's content while you're there.
- Any branches: for example, "if they opened".
Then build it under Automations. Build a workflow covers the editor, and Welcome series is a complete worked example of the most common one.
Turn each automation on only after the list it runs on has been imported, and turn the Mailchimp version off at the same time, 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.
- Update your signup forms. Replace Mailchimp's embedded forms with an IGSendMail form, or new subscribers will keep landing in Mailchimp.
- Then close Mailchimp. Once your first campaign has gone out and the forms point here, you can downgrade or close the Mailchimp account.
Last updated September 25, 2026