A practical checklist for moving your newsletter and email list from Mailchimp to another platform without losing contacts, breaking automations silently, or hurting your deliverability.
This guide is platform-agnostic. It works whether you migrate from Mailchimp to LetterBucket, Substack, Ghost, Kit, Beehiiv, WordPress, or any other email or newsletter platform. The steps that matter — exporting your audience, cleaning your contact list, inventorying automations before they disappear, re-authenticating your sending domain, and testing deliverability — are the same everywhere.
- Exporting your Mailchimp data (contacts, segments, campaigns, reports)
- How to do a Mailchimp export of your audience as CSV — per audience, with tags and statuses intact
- Cleaning your contact list before importing it anywhere
- Migrating the campaigns worth keeping from your campaign archive
- Inventorying and rebuilding automations, journeys, signup forms, and landing pages — the part of a Mailchimp migration people most often underestimate
- Understanding your Mailchimp billing so you know when it is safe to downgrade or close
- Moving your authenticated sending domain (SPF/DKIM/DMARC) to the new platform
- Testing email deliverability before your first real send
- Announcing the migration to your list
- Auditing everything after the move
When you migrate from Mailchimp, you are moving more than an email list. Plan for all of it:
- Contacts (per audience, with subscription statuses)
- Tags and segments
- Campaign archive (the sent campaigns worth keeping)
- Signup forms, pop-ups, and landing pages
- Automations and customer journeys (as an inventory to rebuild — they do not export)
- Authenticated sending domain (SPF/DKIM)
- Integrations and API connections (e-commerce, CRM, Zapier)
- Analytics baseline (open, click, bounce, and unsubscribe rates to compare against)
Do not close your Mailchimp account, cancel your plan, or let it lapse until you have exported all your data, tested your new setup, and sent at least one successful test email from your new platform. Closing a Mailchimp account can delete your data permanently — including audiences, campaign content, and reports.
Your Mailchimp account is your safety net during the migration. Keep it intact (a downgraded plan is fine, as long as your data stays accessible) until the new setup is fully verified.
- Read the full migration checklist once, end to end, before doing anything.
- Work through the guides in order — they follow the same sequence as the checklist.
- Use the templates for contact imports, the automation inventory, announcement emails, and the post-migration audit.
- If you hit a problem, open an issue and describe where you got stuck.
- Mailchimp Migration Checklist — the full step-by-step email list migration checklist with checkboxes
- How to Export Your Data from Mailchimp
- Clean Your Contact List Before Import
- Migrate Your Mailchimp Campaign Archive
- Rebuild Your Mailchimp Automations and Forms
- Move Your Custom Domain Away from Mailchimp
- Deliverability Checklist After Migrating from Mailchimp
- Contact import CSV template
- Migration announcement email
- Automation inventory
- Domain switch checklist
- Post-migration audit
This checklist is written for creators, founders, marketers, consultants, and newsletter operators who want to migrate from Mailchimp to a Mailchimp alternative without losing contacts or breaking the automated emails their business quietly depends on. It assumes no technical background beyond being able to download a CSV file and update a DNS record (and the domain guide walks you through that part).
Everyone has their own reasons, but the most common ones are cost and complexity. Mailchimp bills by total contact count, and on many plans unsubscribed and non-subscribed contacts count toward your bill — so a list that looks like 5,000 subscribers can be priced as 8,000 contacts. Whatever your reason, write it down before you choose a new platform: it will tell you what actually matters in the switch.
Every platform handles imports, automations, and domains a little differently. Not everything transfers between platforms — automations, journeys, signup forms, and landing pages in particular do not export from Mailchimp at all and must be rebuilt. Where something depends on your destination platform, this guide says so — always verify the specifics with the platform you are moving to. Mailchimp's interface also changes over time, so treat any UI directions here as a practical reference and verify the current options in your own account.
- Substack Migration Checklist — the same approach for moving a newsletter off Substack
- Substack Alternatives — a platform comparison if you are still deciding where to go
Found something outdated, unclear, or missing? Open an issue or a pull request. Mailchimp's interface, export options, and pricing change over time, and this checklist stays useful because people report what changed.
This checklist is maintained by LetterBucket, a simple newsletter platform for creators who want to write, send, and publish from one place.
If you are moving your newsletter from Mailchimp and want help migrating your contacts, campaign archive, and automations, get in touch: