Moving your list from Curated

Curated exports your readers as a CSV, and Issue Mint reads the address column and, if your publication collected them, a name column. The format of the two products is close enough that there are fewer decisions to make here than in most moves.

What moves is the list. Your issues, your archive and your sponsorship bookings stay in Curated, and the sections below say what to do about each.

Where the export lives

Curated organises everything by publication, so the export sits inside the publication whose readers you want rather than in your account settings. Open its subscriber list and look for the export or download option.

If you run several publications, export them one at a time and name the files as you download them. Two exports in a downloads folder look identical an hour later, and importing the wrong one into the wrong newsletter is tedious to undo.

Which columns matter

The address column, and a name column if your signup form asked for one.

A Curated export normally also carries the date each reader subscribed and something recording whether they are still subscribed. Issue Mint reads neither, and it reads no status column at all, so anybody who unsubscribed needs deleting from the file before you upload it. Every row that reaches the import becomes an active subscriber.

If the name column holds full names rather than first names, either split it in a spreadsheet or leave names out of the import. Issue Mint stores a first name and uses it in greetings, so “Alexandra Whitcombe-Brown” in that field reads badly in an email.

What to map, and what the import asks

Point the email field at the address column, choose a name column or turn names off, tick the box confirming these people gave you permission to email them, and write a sentence saying where the list came from.

“Subscribers from my Curated publication, running since 2019” is exactly the sort of answer that sentence is for. Issue Mint pre-selects the columns from the header row, so most of this screen is confirmation. Importing a CSV covers the file rules, including the 20 MB limit and how to split a larger export.

What the counts mean afterwards

Issue Mint emails you when the import finishes, and the email carries an imported, a skipped and an invalid count.

Imported is your new list. Skipped is addresses already present, duplicates within the file, and anything suppressed by an earlier hard bounce or complaint. Invalid is rows that are not addresses, plus addresses on domains that can no longer receive mail, which are named on your subscribers page and kept there for 180 days. An import of more than 5,000 addresses is held for one of us to look at before anything is mailed, which a held import explains.

Leave your Curated archive online

Your Curated issues do not transfer, and deleting them would throw away search traffic and inbound links you spent years earning.

Leave the old archive published at its current address. Issue Mint gives you a new archive that starts with your next issue, with its own feed and its own social cards, and it builds from there. Search engines and your website covers how a new archive gets found. If your Curated publication was on your own domain, plan the handover: point the domain here when you are ready to stop publishing there, and until then run the new archive on its issuemint.com address.

Rebuild the sponsorship side deliberately

Your slot types, prices and bookings stay in Curated, and setting them up again here is a job for one sitting.

It is worth doing properly rather than reproducing what you had, because sponsorship inventory works differently on this side: slots have prices, upcoming issue dates appear on a calendar sponsors can book from, and enquiries arrive with the dates already attached. Your day-to-day curating moves into the link library, which is the equivalent of the queue you are used to. The Issue Mint and Curated comparison covers the rest of the differences, including the reasons somebody might reasonably stay put.