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Integrations

Switching from Mailchimp

You bring contacts over from Mailchimp by exporting the audience to CSV and importing it into SmartMailer address books.

What you can bring over

  • E-mail, name and other contact details. For each detail you want to bring over, add a text, e-mail, phone, number or date field to the address book.
  • You can bring over the consent date and IP address: map the OPTIN_TIME column to CONSENT_AT and OPTIN_IP to CONSENT_IP. For contacts that did not come through a Mailchimp form these columns are often empty. That is fine.
  • Open and click history and purchase history are not transferred. Tags and segments are not transferred. In a campaign, segmentation by address book fields replaces them: turn a tag or group into a contact field.

Step by step

  1. 1

    Prepare address books in SmartMailer

    In the Address books menu, create a recipient address book for each list and add fields for the details you want to bring over. The language is set on the address book, so split a multilingual list into several address books. For unsubscribes you have an address book of the Unsubscribes type called Default unsubscribes, and you can create more.

  2. 2

    Export the audience

    In Mailchimp, click Audience, then Export audience, and in the Export all contacts? pop-up click Export CSV. Only the Owner and Admin roles can export. Download the finished export under Audience > More options > Export history within 30 days.

  3. 3

    Unpack the files

    The export is a ZIP with one CSV file per contact status, and the status is in the file name: subscribed, unsubscribed, non-subscribed and cleaned.

  4. 4

    Import the recipients

    In the recipient address book, click Import contacts and choose only the subscribed file. In Column mapping, Email Address, First Name and Last Name are mapped to the e-mail, first name and last name automatically. Map the other columns to the fields you added.

  5. 5

    Import the unsubscribes

    Import the unsubscribed and cleaned files the same way into an address book of the Unsubscribes type. Select it in the Unsubscribe list field of every campaign so that nothing is sent to these addresses.

  6. 6

    Check the result

    After the import, SmartMailer shows how many contacts were added, how many were updated and which rows were not imported and why. For a file with more than 1,000 rows, you will find this in the Background imports panel on the contacts page of the address book once it is finished. Do not cancel your Mailchimp account until the import is finished and checked.

What to watch out for

  • The non-subscribed file does not belong to the recipients. It holds people who interacted with you but never opted in to marketing e-mails.
  • Archived contacts are not in the regular export; Mailchimp exports them separately. Their export does not tell whether they were subscribed, so do not import them as recipients.
  • Upload the files as they arrived. Opening and saving them in Excel can break accented characters.
  • The address column may hold the default country US even when the contact is not in the USA. Do not bring such a country over.
  • Leave columns you do not want to bring over on Do not import in the mapping. This also applies to empty unnamed columns at the end of the file, which appear after editing in Excel and are not visible there.
  • A file can be at most 50 MB. A file with more than 1,000 rows is imported in the background, so you do not need to split it or wait on the page. The result arrives by e-mail and is shown in the Background imports panel on the contacts page of the address book.

Always bring over the unsubscribes

People who unsubscribed must not receive commercial messages after the switch, so do not skip the unsubscribes. Consent to receive e-mails is given to you as the controller, not to the tool. Do name SmartMailer as the new processor in your privacy policy, though. In Slovakia, contacts obtained through a sale may be addressed without prior consent only with offers of your own similar goods and services (the exception under § 116 ods. 14 and 15 of Act 452/2021 Z. z.), and for at most one year after the contractual relationship ends (§ 116 ods. 16). This limit applies only to that exception, not to contacts with separately documented consent. So review the Slovak contacts you address under the exception before importing.