Move your Mailchimp contacts to their new home
If you’re importing your Mailchimp contacts into Kit, you have two options:
Use our Mailchimp contacts importer
Import your Mailchimp contacts via a CSV file
Using our Mailchimp contacts importer will be the quicker and simpler approach. With a few clicks, you’ll be able to import all your Mailchimp contacts and the data relating to their Audiences, Groups, Tags, and geolocation.
However, if you want to bring over only certain lists of Mailchimp contacts (instead of all of your Mailchimp contacts), then you’ll need to import them via a CSV file.
So let’s go through both methods of importing your Mailchimp contacts 👇
Method 1: Importing your Mailchimp contacts using our Mailchimp contacts importer
Log in to Kit and navigate to Subscribers under the Grow tab in the top navigation. Click the Add Subscribers button:
In the Add subscribers window that pops up, select Other provider > Mailchimp.
You’ll be asked to provide your Mailchimp API key. Go grab it from your Mailchimp account (create it first if needed), and then paste it into our form field for your API key.
NOTE: If you need to change the Mailchimp API key associated with your Kit account, contact support. We’ll help remove your existing Mailchimp API key so you can add the new one.
The import might take some time if you are importing a larger list. We’ll email you with a confirmation when the process is complete.
All your Mailchimp contacts can be found on the Subscribers page after the import. When you click the individual subscriber profiles, you’ll also be able to see your contacts’ geolocation, contact ratings, and so on.
And here are a few things to take note of:
Your Mailchimp contacts will have Tags in Kit corresponding to their Mailchimp Audience, Segment, Group, and Tag
For example, if your Mailchimp contact had been in an Audience called “Photography Pros,” we’ll tag your contact with “Photography Pros” when bringing them over to Kit.
The Tags we add to your Mailchimp contacts will trigger any Automation Rules and Visual Automations that have such Tags as a trigger or entry point respectively
Following from the same example above, if you have a Visual Automation that has the “Photography Pros” tag as an entry point, your Mailchimp contact will be sent through that Visual Automation after we’ve tagged them with “Photography Pros.”
If you don’t want your Mailchimp contacts to be put through such Rules or Visual Automations, temporarily disable these Rules or Visual Automations (or use this process) before starting the import.
Method 2: Importing your Mailchimp contacts via a CSV file
NOTE: At this time, the importing of your Mailchimp contacts’ geolocation, contact ratings, and subscribe dates via a CSV file is not supported.
Instead of using our Mailchimp importer, you can also import your Mailchimp contacts via a CSV file:
1. Export your Mailchimp contacts
First, export your Mailchimp contacts as a CSV file. You can export an entire list of all of your contacts in a certain Audience, or a list of only Mailchimp contacts in a certain Segment, Group, Tag, and so on.
2. Import your CSV file into Kit
Once you’ve obtained the CSV file of your Mailchimp contacts, navigate to Subscribers under the Grow tab in the top navigation.
Click the Add Subscribers button, followed by Import a CSV.
Upload your CSV file to our CSV file importer.
3. Map your Mailchimp contact data
Next, map your Mailchimp contacts’ data to our contact fields.
For example, you’d map your Mailchimp contacts’ email addresses and first names to the “Email” and “First name” fields respectively.
You can also map your Mailchimp contacts’ custom fields to custom fields for your Kit subscribers. (Create these custom fields first as needed.)
In addition, if the contacts in your CSV file have a comma-separated list of tags, map these tags to our “Comma-separated list of tags” field.
Click Next to proceed.
4. Add your Mailchimp contacts to Kit Tags, Forms, or Sequences
After that, add your Mailchimp contacts to Kit Tags, Forms, or Sequences as needed. In particular, consider adding Tags that correspond to your contacts' Mailchimp Audience, Segment, Group, or Tag, as relevant. (Create such Tags first if they haven’t already been created.)
Adding these Tags is an optional step, but we suggest doing it to track where your subscribers came from.
For your convenience, we'll propose adding them to a new Tag with a clear import name and date during import. Feel free to use our suggestion, create your own Tag, or skip this step entirely—it's up to you.
For example, to add the contacts from your "Photography Pros" Mailchimp audience to an existing Tag called "Photography Pros," disable the Identify this import with a new tag option.
Enable the Add subscribers to existing tags option, and then select your Tag from the list.
Temporarily disable any Automation Rules and Visual Automations that you don’t want to trigger as a result of adding your contacts to certain Tags, Forms, or Sequences.
Finally, click Start import to import your contacts to Kit.
5. Repeat the CSV import process to import all your Mailchimp contact data
Repeat steps 1 to 4 above for all the other Mailchimp lists that you want to import to Kit via a CSV file.
For example, if you’ve previously imported a list of all the Mailchimp contacts in a certain Audience, you can repeat the process to import a list of all your Mailchimp contacts that have a certain Tag.
If we come across duplicate contacts during the import process, we’ll merge them to avoid double-counting.
However, if we encounter new subscriber data for fields that already contain data, we will replace such existing data in Kit with the new data. This includes replacing the existing data with blank values if your import file contains blank fields.
To learn more about importing subscribers via a CSV file, check out these articles:
Importing Mailchimp contacts: a summary
Contact data to be imported | Can this data point(s) be imported by the Mailchimp importer? | Can this data point be imported via a CSV file? |
Email address | Yes, it will be automatically imported to the subscriber’s “Email” field in Kit | Yes, map your contact’s email address to the “Email” field in Kit during the import |
First name | Yes, it will be automatically imported to the subscriber’s “First name” field in Kit | Yes, map your contact’s first name to the “First name” field in Kit during the import |
Custom fields | Yes, they will be automatically imported to the subscriber’s custom fields | Yes, map your contact’s custom fields to the custom fields in Kit during the import |
Audience | Yes, it will be automatically added as a Kit tag to the subscriber | Yes, create a Tag in Kit for the Audience and add your Mailchimp contacts to this tag during the import |
Group | Yes, it will be automatically added as a Kit tag to the subscriber | Yes, create a Tag in Kit for the Group and add your Mailchimp contacts to this tag during the import |
Segment | Yes, it will be automatically added as a Kit Tag to the subscriber | Yes, create a Tag in Kit for the Segment and add your Mailchimp contacts to this tag during the import |
Tag | Yes, it will be automatically added as a Kit Tag to the subscriber | Yes, create a Tag in Kit for the Tag and add your Mailchimp contacts to this tag during the import |
Geolocation | Yes, it will be automatically imported to your contacts’ subscriber profiles in Kit | No |
Contact rating | Yes, it will be automatically imported to your contacts’ subscriber profiles in Kit | No |
Subscribe date | Yes, it will be automatically imported to your contacts’ subscriber profiles in Kit | No |
Need a hand with importing your Mailchimp contacts? Reach out to our migrations team, and they’ll be in touch.