If you’re importing your Mailchimp contacts into ConvertKit, you have two options:

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 👇

Log into ConvertKit and navigate to Subscribers under the Grow tab in the top navigation. Click the Add Subscribers button:

Select the Import from another provider option in the “Import Subscribers” window that pops up.

From the list of available providers, click Mailchimp.

You’ll be asked to provide your Mailchimp API key. Go grab it from your Mailchimp account (create it first if needed), then paste it into our form field for your API key.

Click Continue import, followed by Start import on the next screen.

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 find your contacts’ geolocation, contact ratings, and so on.

And here are a few things to take note of:

For example, if your Mailchimp contact had been in an Audience called “Photography Pros,” then we’ll tag your contact with “Photography Pros” when bringing them over to ConvertKit.

Following from the same example above, if you have a visual automation that has the “Photography Pros” tag as an entry point, then 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, then temporarily disable these rules or visual automations (or use this process) before starting the import.

Instead of using our Mailchimp importer, you can also import your Mailchimp contacts via a CSV file:

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.

Here’s where you’d export your entire Audience, for example:

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.

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 ConvertKit subscribers. (Create these custom fields first as needed.)

After that, add tags to your Mailchimp contacts that correspond to their Mailchimp Audience, Segment, Group, or Tag, as needed. (Create such tags first if they haven’t already been created.)

For example, if you are bringing over your Mailchimp contacts in an Audience called “Photography Pros,” then add your Mailchimp contacts to a tag called “Photography Pros.”

Alternatively, if the contacts in your CSV file have a comma-separated list of tags, you can map your tags to our “Comma-separated list of tags” field instead.

Before adding tags to your imported Mailchimp contacts, don’t forget to temporarily disable any automation rules and visual automations that you don’t want to trigger!

Repeat steps 1 to 3 above for all the other Mailchimp lists that you want to import to ConvertKit via a CSV file.

For example, if you’ve previously imported a list of all the Mailchimp contacts in a certain Audience, you can then 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 ConvertKit 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:

Need a hand with importing your Mailchimp contacts? Reach out to our migrations team and they’ll be in touch!