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 | |
Send email / Send email with a survey | Action > Email sequence |
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:
A contact signs up through your email form
If the contact has the “Newsletter” tag, then skip to the next step. Otherwise, tag that contact with “Newsletter”
Contact immediately receives a welcome email
Contact receives a follow-up email one day later
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!