Importing Your Audience from Mailchimp
Crafted Call reads the export files Mailchimp gives you, so moving an audience across is a download and an upload rather than a spreadsheet project. Your statuses, tags and signup dates come with it. The importer lives at Admin → Marketing → Audience & Segments, behind the Import button.
Export from Mailchimp
In Mailchimp, go to Audience → All contacts → Export Audience. Mailchimp emails you a download link for a ZIP file.
Inside the ZIP is a CSV per contact group. Crafted Call recognizes all of them by how the filename starts:
| Mailchimp file starts with | Becomes |
|---|---|
subscribed, as in subscribed_members_export.csv | Active |
unsubscribed | Unsubscribed |
cleaned | Bounced |
nonsubscribed | Unsubscribed |
Import the subscribed file first, because it is the group you can actually mail. Importing the others afterwards is worth doing: it carries your opt-out history across, so someone who left your Mailchimp list is never mailed from Crafted Call by mistake.
Run the import
- Open Admin → Marketing → Audience & Segments and select Import. The button also sits on the Subscribers page.
- Choose the Mailchimp tab. The panel repeats the export steps and links to Mailchimp's own documentation.
- Drop the CSV into the upload area. Crafted Call detects the Mailchimp format and maps the fields for you.
- Check the mapping on Map Fields, then read the Preview.
- Tick the consent attestation and confirm.
- Results reports what was created, what was updated and what was skipped.
Self-serve imports accept files up to 5 MB and 5,000 rows. A larger audience should be imported in parts, one Mailchimp file at a time.
What comes across
Statuses are preserved. Subscribed contacts become Active, unsubscribed contacts stay Unsubscribed, and cleaned contacts are marked as Bounced. Unsubscribed and bounced contacts are never mailed, and no later import can move an opt-out back to subscribed.
Tags come across. Mailchimp's TAGS column maps straight onto Crafted Call tags, so the groups you built over years arrive intact and are immediately usable in segments.
Signup dates come across. The opt-in time on each row becomes the subscriber's signup date, rather than the date you ran the import. That matters: it is part of your consent record, and it keeps date-based segments honest.
Locations come across in part. City, state or region, postal code and country are read from Mailchimp's address column. Street lines are deliberately dropped, because Crafted Call has nowhere to keep them and no reason to hold that much personal data.
Names come across. First name and last name map directly.
Tag an import, then segment it
On the preview step you can apply tags to every contact in the import. Use it. A tag such as source-mailchimp-2026 gives you a permanent handle on exactly this group.
After the import finishes, the results screen offers Create a segment from this import. Name it and select Create segment. The segment is built on those tags, so it keeps itself up to date as more contacts with the same tags arrive.
Consent still applies
The import will not run until you confirm that every contact gave consent to receive marketing email from your organization, that you have a lawful basis and a record of that consent, and that none of the addresses were purchased, rented or scraped.
An existing Mailchimp audience usually satisfies this, because those contacts opted in to hear from you. A list a colleague forwarded you, or a conference attendee export, usually does not. Australia and New Zealand require consent before you send rather than an opt-out afterwards, so the distinction has real consequences. See Email Consent by Country.
After the import
- Check the counts on the Subscribers page against what Mailchimp reported. Rows without an email address are skipped, and the results screen says how many.
- Look at your tags. This is the moment to rename or merge the ones that accumulated over the years, before they multiply.
- Set up your sending domain so the first campaign from Crafted Call arrives from the address your subscribers already recognize. See Sending Email From Your Own Domain.
- Rebuild your recurring emails as automations rather than re-sending old campaigns. See Automated Email Sequences.
Where to go next
- Subscriber Management and Signup Forms for what to do with the list once it lands.
- Segments, Lists and A/B Testing to turn those tags into audiences.
- Email Campaign Basics to send your first campaign.
- Migrating from Another Platform if you are also bringing calls and submissions across.
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