Migrate from Mailchimp to beehiiv in 3 Easy Steps

You've decided to make the switch from Mailchimp to beehiiv and take advantage of beehiiv’s superior opportunities for subscriber growth. Some people worry over losing their existing email lists. But transferring your audience is easier than you think. All it takes is a few minutes and a few simple steps. Soon, everyone on your list will be moved into their new home.

How to Migrate from Mailchimp to beehiiv

Export. Clean. Import. Smile.

Okay, I suppose we can provide a little more information.

Step One: Export Mailchimp Contacts

Before you can bring your readership into beehiiv, you first need to export it from Mailchimp. Head to the "Audience" section of your dashboard. Then, click on "All Contacts."

Now you're looking at your full email list. It's time to make a decision. Do you want to transfer all of your contacts? Or only some of them? Make sure that you only migrate the people ready and waiting for your newsletter. If you run other email marketing initiatives, this may not include everyone on your list.

You can filter your list by tags or audience segments before exporting it. Once you've selected the appropriate contacts, click on "Export Audience" — or "Export Segment" if you only want to export a specific group.

This button will take you to an "Audience Exports" page while Mailchimp gets busy emailing you the CSV file you requested. After you've exported an audience once, you can come to this page to regenerate the same file if needed. Note the little button "Export as CSV" by each successful export.

Credit where it's due — Mailchimp has a great help page for viewing and exporting contacts. If you run into any trouble, look for answers here first.

Step Two: Clean Up CSV File

After you download your CSV file, take a moment to look it over. Sometimes, people run into issues of column and field distortion. By importing your file into Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel before heading to beehiiv, you can fix these issues quickly. This will ensure a seamless transfer to beehiiv.

Check to make sure that all of your information is correct and falls under the proper column heading. For example, some people who collect both physical addresses and emails have found that addresses get divided into components, under separate columns for "City," "State," and "Country." You may need to adjust your formatting to omit commas between these elements, using dashes instead.

After you clean up the file, export it — still as a CSV file — from Google Sheets or Excel. If you’re worried about misplacing the file, temporarily save it to the desktop for quick and easy access.

Step Three: Import Contacts Into beehiiv

Now that you've created a CSV with all of your contacts, you're ready to move them. Open up your beehiiv dashboard. Under "Audience," select "Subscribers." See that shiny button saying "Import Subscribers"? Click on it.

You have two options to add subscribers: uploading an email list CSV or transcribing them manually. (But we've done steps one and two to spare you the labor of manually copying each address over).

Under “Upload Email List,” click "Choose File" and select your saved document. Then, hit "Import."

If you have any fields not natively supported by beehiiv — such as those "City-State-Country" fields you may have created — you'll need to import them as custom fields.

Can I Import Content into beehiiv?

beehiiv is committed to helping you grow your business with compelling content that stands out. Unfortunately, due to significant differences between the platforms - particularly around design elements and formatting - it's not currently possible to import material created with Mailchimp. Instead, you'll have to transfer content manually. beehiiv is very good at retaining the styles of content you copy and paste.

But to get the most from this powerful platform, nothing beats fresh content. Start playing with all of the tools beehiiv puts at your disposal, and set your creativity free.

When You Make the Move to beehiiv, Bring All Your Friends

Migrating your audience from Mailchimp to beehiiv is easy and only takes a few steps. In no time at all, you'll have brought all of your subscribers on board the platform with you.

That's when the real fun starts. Start delivering your beautiful new newsletter and watch your audience expand. With beehiiv’s growth-focused tools, you'll be able to scale quickly and watch your subscriber numbers soar.

So tick “Transfer audience” off your to-do list. Then, move on to more exciting things.