Moving your list from Mailchimp

Mailchimp hands you your contacts as CSV files, and Issue Mint reads two columns out of them: the email address, and a first name if your export has one. Mailchimp’s exports are wide, and every other column is ignored.

Two things are worth knowing before you start. The export arrives as a zip rather than a single file, and only one of the files inside it holds the people you still mail.

Where the export lives

Mailchimp’s export sits with the contacts rather than in your account settings: open the audience you want, then look for the export or download option above the contact table.

Mailchimp builds the file in the background, so on a large audience it may be a few minutes before there is anything to download, and it may email you when the file is ready. What arrives is a zip archive containing one CSV for each contact status Mailchimp tracks, which is normally the subscribed contacts, the ones who unsubscribed, the ones Mailchimp has cleaned because mail to them kept failing, and any non-subscribed contacts it is holding. Unzip it before you go near Issue Mint.

Which of those files to upload

Upload the file of subscribed contacts, and none of the others.

If you cannot tell which file is which, open each one and compare the number of rows against the counts Mailchimp shows per status. It is worth the minute. The cleaned file is a list of addresses that have already failed, and the unsubscribed file is a list of people who asked to be left alone.

Which columns matter

The address column, usually headed with something like Email Address, and a first name column if you collected names.

Issue Mint guesses both from the header row and normally gets a Mailchimp header right, so the mapping screen opens with the correct columns already chosen and you are confirming rather than hunting. Leave the name field set to not importing names if your audience has no real names in it, because a first name column full of addresses is worse than nothing: it ends up in your greeting line. Everything else stays behind, including member rating, the opt-in and last-changed timestamps, language, the tags column, and any birthday or address fields.

The rest of the flow is the same for any file, and importing a CSV covers it: a tick to confirm these people gave you permission, and a sentence saying where the list came from. “Signups from my site since 2021, exported from Mailchimp” is a perfectly good answer.

What the counts mean afterwards

The import finishes with three numbers, and Issue Mint emails you when it is done.

Imported is the number of new readers now on your list. Skipped covers addresses already on the list, duplicates inside the file itself, and anything on our suppression list from a previous hard bounce or complaint, which an import never revives. Invalid covers rows that are not addresses at all, and addresses on a domain that can no longer receive mail anywhere. Issue Mint keeps the addresses it refused for 180 days and names them on your subscribers page, so the addresses it would not take can be read back a week later rather than taken on trust.

Why the total is lower than Mailchimp’s

Mailchimp’s headline audience figure counts contacts, and Issue Mint’s counts readers you can mail, so expect the second to be smaller.

Three things account for nearly all of the gap: unsubscribed and non-subscribed contacts you correctly left out, duplicates where the same person appears in more than one export, and cleaned contacts whose domains have since gone dark. A list that has been sitting in Mailchimp unmailed for a year or two loses more than one that has been mailed weekly, which is a fact about the addresses rather than about the import.

If the import waits for a check

An import of more than 5,000 addresses, or one that would more than double your list, waits for one of us to look at it. On a trial the figure is 500 addresses.

Your readers still land, and you can see them, but nothing is sent to them until the import is released, and that rarely takes long. There is more on what to expect in a held import. Imports on your own Amazon SES or SMTP account skip this entirely.

What does not come across

Your Mailchimp campaigns, automations, landing pages and signup forms stay in Mailchimp. Only the list moves.

That is usually less work than it sounds, because a curated newsletter is written week to week rather than assembled from templates: you write your next issue in the composer and send it. If you are still deciding, the Issue Mint and Mailchimp comparison is the honest version, including the cases where Mailchimp is the better tool for what you are doing.