ConvertKit Sequences = Mailchimp email campaigns, but better

If you wanted to set up a series of automated emails in Mailchimp, then you’d have to create a “customer journey” containing your email campaigns and time delay rules to introduce a send delay between each email. Like so:

To do the same in ConvertKit, however, you’d create a “Sequence.” These are self-contained sets of emails with their own automated send schedules.

Hence, if you’re coming over from Mailchimp and want to recreate your Mailchimp email campaigns as ConvertKit Sequences, you’ll need to:

In this guide, we’ll get into how to do both. You’ll need a decent understanding of the ConvertKit email editor to recreate your Mailchimp email campaigns, so we recommend reading our guide to the email editor if you aren’t too familiar with it.

Log into Mailchimp in one browser tab, and open the customer journey containing the email campaigns you want to recreate in ConvertKit. Keep this browser tab open for convenient reference.

Next, open ConvertKit in a separate browser tab and click Sequences under the Send tab of the top navigation.

Select the + New sequence button to create a blank new Sequence and choose a default email template for it.

Go back to Mailchimp, and click the first email campaign in your Mailchimp customer journey to access its settings.

Copy the subject of your email campaign and paste it into the subject line of the first email in your ConvertKit Sequence.

Switch back to your Mailchimp email campaign, and click Edit Email Content to access the body of the campaign.

Similarly, copy/paste the text in the body of your Mailchimp email campaign into your ConvertKit Sequence email.

To insert images into your Sequence emails, click the area in the email editor in which you’d like to add the image.

Click the + button that appears on the left to launch the content block menu, then select “Image” to upload and insert your image.

Click the image itself, followed by the Styles section in the right sidebar, to access image settings such as adding an image URL, or adjusting the image width.

Using the content block menu, you can also add other cool things such as headings, lists, galleries, and buttons.

To learn more, check out our separate guides on text formatting and adding media to your emails.

When you’ve finished recreating the contents of your first Mailchimp email campaign, click the Add Email button in the right sidebar to add a new email to your Sequence.

Repeat the recreation of your email subject and body for all the email campaigns in your Mailchimp customer journey.

For every email campaign in a Mailchimp customer journey, you’ll be able to set up its:

Here’s how to recreate these settings in ConvertKit:

In ConvertKit, we set the “To” email address to your subscriber’s email address by default. At the moment, we don’t offer the option to change this to a combination of your subscriber’s first and last names, unlike in Mailchimp.

However, you can set the “From” email address for your Sequence. To do so, click Settings at the top right of the Sequence editor.

Then, click the “Send emails as” field to select one of your existing “From” email addresses.

Go to the Settings tab in the Sequence editor. Under the “Sequence Schedule” section, set the days and time on which your Sequence emails should be sent.

The “Sequence Schedule” settings affect all the emails in your Sequence. However, you can adjust the Send Days of specific emails through their individual “Send this email” setting.

As an example, you may set up the Sequence Schedule to have your Sequence emails sent only on weekdays. From there, you can additionally configure the “Send this email” setting of one Sequence email to have that email sent only on Mondays.

In the same “Send this email” setting, you can also specify the duration of delay between your Sequence emails (in day or hour intervals). This would be similar to adding a time delay rule in between emails in a Mailchimp customer journey:

For instance, if you had set up a time delay of one day between the sending of two emails in your Mailchimp customer journey, then set up the second email in your ConvertKit Sequence to be sent one day after the last email.

To activate your ConvertKit Sequence, be sure to enable the Published setting for every email in the Sequence. Otherwise, the emails will not be sent.

And congrats—you’ve completed a basic recreation of the email campaigns in your Mailchimp customer journey as a ConvertKit Sequence!

ConvertKit Sequences are pretty powerful, and also come with options for:

For more information on these (and how to create a ConvertKit Sequence in general), read our guide to creating and sending a Sequence.

Need help with recreating your Mailchimp email campaigns in ConvertKit? Contact our migrations team and they’ll be happy to assist!

How to switch your Mailchimp customer journeys to ConvertKit Visual Automations