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How to switch your Mailchimp customer journeys to Kit Visual Automations
How to switch your Mailchimp customer journeys to Kit Visual Automations

Map your Mailchimp customer journey starting points, rules, and actions as Kit Visual Automation entry points and steps.

Updated over a week ago

Move your Mailchimp customer journeys to Kit

Coming over from Mailchimp and need to bring over your customer journeys to Kit? You’ll do so by creating “Visual Automations” on our platform, and this guide will give you the lowdown on how to do just that.

If you aren’t familiar with Visual Automations, we recommend checking out our guides to Visual Automations, and creating your first Visual Automation, first. But if you're good to go, let’s outline the process of recreating your Mailchimp customer journey’s:

  • Starting point(s)

  • Rules and actions

Afterward, we’ll do a full demo of how to recreate a simple Mailchimp customer journey as a Kit Visual Automation.

NOTE: Do you need to recreate your Mailchimp classic automations in Kit instead? Then read our separate guide to switching your Mailchimp classic automations to Kit Visual Automations.

Recreating the starting point(s)

Log in to Mailchimp in one browser tab, and open the customer journey you want to move to Kit. Keep this browser tab open for convenient reference.

Next, open Kit in a separate browser tab and click Visual Automations under the Automate tab of the top navigation. Click the + New automation button, followed by Start from scratch, to create a blank new Visual Automation.

Switch back to your Mailchimp customer journey, and check out its starting point(s) so you can map them as entry points to your Kit Visual Automation.

At the moment, we offer equivalent Visual Automation entry points for these Mailchimp customer journey starting points:

For this Mailchimp customer journey starting point…

Replace it with this Kit Visual Automation entry point

Signs up

Joins a form

Tag added

Is added to a Tag

Joins audience group

Is added to a Tag (where you’ve created a Tag for such an audience group)

Audience field changes

Custom field

Buys any product / Buys a certain product

Purchase

For example, if your Mailchimp customer journey starts with a subscriber signing up to your audience via a certain form, then select “Joins a form” as your Kit Visual Automation's entry point.

As for other Mailchimp customer journey starting points, you may be able to recreate them via workarounds such as:

Mailchimp customer journey starting point

How to recreate this entry point in your Kit Visual Automation

Sent an email

Set up a separate Visual Automation to add a certain Tag to subscribers who are sent an email Sequence. After that, set that Tag as the entry point of your current Visual Automation using the “Is added to a tag” option

Clicks any email link / Clicks specific email link

Set up a Link Trigger, where subscribers who click a certain link in your email will be tagged with a certain Tag. After that, set that Tag as your Visual Automation's entry point using the “Is added to a tag” option

Recreating the rules and actions

With your Kit Visual Automation's entry point set up, you’ll recreate your Mailchimp customer journey’s rules and actions next.

Here are the Kit Visual Automation step equivalents for Mailchimp customer journey rules and actions:

For this Mailchimp customer journey rule or action…

Replace it with this Kit Visual Automation step

If / Else

Wait for Trigger

Time delay

Action > Delay (or Action > Email sequence, if the time delay is part of a sequence of emails)

Send email / Send email with a survey

Group/Ungroup

Action > Add or remove tag

Tag/Untag

Action > Add or remove tag

Unsubscribe

Action > Unsubscribe

Update contact

Action > Set custom field

Archive contact

Action > Unsubscribe

As an example, your customer journey may tag all contacts that enter it with the “Newsletter” tag. Therefore, you’ll create an action in your Kit Visual Automation that adds contacts to a “Newsletter” Tag as well.

Repeat this process for all the rules and actions in your Mailchimp customer journey. When you’re done, toggle the Active switch at the top right to activate your Kit Visual Automation.

Recreation demo

Knowing how Mailchimp customer journey starting points, rules, and actions map to our Kit Visual Automation entry points and steps can be rather abstract, so we’ll demo how to recreate a simple customer journey that has this flow:

  1. A contact signs up through your email form

  2. If the contact has the “Newsletter” tag, then skip to the next step. Otherwise, tag that contact with “Newsletter”

  3. Contact immediately receives a welcome email

  4. Contact receives a follow-up email one day later

  5. Contact exits the customer journey

1. A contact signs up through your email form

In your blank new Kit Visual Automation, select “Joins a form” and select the name of the form that will kick-start the Visual Automation.

2. If the contact has the “Newsletter” tag, then move to the next step. Otherwise, tag that contact with “Newsletter”

Add a Condition that checks for whether the contact has been tagged with “Newsletter.”

For contacts who have not been tagged with “Newsletter,” you’ll create a new action under the “No” branch to add these contacts to the “Newsletter” Tag.

3. Contact immediately receives a welcome email, and 4. One day later, the contact receives a follow-up email

We can combine these two steps by creating a new Kit Sequence containing the two emails, with the first email being sent immediately and the second one a day later.

Check out our separate guide to recreating your Mailchimp email campaigns as Kit sequences for more information on how to do so.

5. Contact exits the customer journey

One last step! Activate the Visual Automation, and you’re done. 🎉

Your Visual Automation will start running. When contacts finish going through all its steps, they'll exit it automatically.

Having trouble migrating your Mailchimp customer journeys to Kit? Reach out to our migrations team and they’ll be happy to help you out!

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