Cancelling Mailchimp: Migration Plan
A Charlotte roofing company migrated 2,400 contacts from Mailchimp to two-way SMS and saw engagement jump from 18% to 34%. Get the migration plan.
Jason Morales owns a roofing company in Charlotte. He had been using Mailchimp for three years. His list had 2,400 contacts: past customers, estimate requests that did not close, and homeowners who had submitted forms on his website. He was paying $65 per month for the Mailchimp Essentials plan.
Operator details anonymized. Based on a real LeadExploder account matching this profile.
His open rate was 18%. His reply rate was 0.3%. Nobody was clicking anything. The monthly newsletter he sent, “Roofing Tips for Charlotte Homeowners,” was an expensive exercise in sending emails to people who had forgotten who he was.
In September 2025 Jason migrated that same list to a platform with native two-way SMS. He kept the email database. He added the phone numbers he had collected. Then he ran an SMS re-engagement campaign to the 1,100 contacts who had given him a phone number.
SMS open rate on the re-engagement: 34%. Replies: 61. Estimates booked from that campaign: 14. Revenue from those 14 estimates: $47,000 in closed roofing contracts (LeadExploder platform account data, 2024-2025).
Mailchimp was costing him $65 per month to maintain a list that was doing nothing. The same list, on a different channel, became a revenue asset. Here is how to make that migration without losing your subscribers.
How do you export your Mailchimp list the right way?
The export process is straightforward, but the field selection is where people make mistakes.
Log in to Mailchimp. Go to Audience. Click All Contacts. Click the Export Audience button in the top right. Select the CSV format. On the export configuration screen, you will see options for which fields to include. Do not use the default. Select all fields.
The fields you need to export:
- Email address
- First name
- Last name
- Phone number (if collected in your forms)
- All custom merge tags (these are any extra fields you created, such as city, service type, or job date)
- Tags (any segment labels you have applied)
- Subscribed/Unsubscribed status
- Date subscribed
- Date of last activity
The unsubscribe status is the most important field. Every contact who has unsubscribed in Mailchimp needs to come into your new platform as an opted-out contact. If you import unsubscribes as active contacts and send to them, you are violating CAN-SPAM and will damage your sending reputation on the new platform immediately.
Save the CSV. Do not open it in Excel to edit it before importing. Excel can corrupt date fields and modify phone number formatting in ways that break import mapping. Open it in Google Sheets if you need to review it.
How do you import to a new platform without triggering spam filters?
The spam filter risk is real but manageable. Here is what triggers it: importing 2,400 contacts and immediately sending a broadcast to all of them from a new sending domain with no established reputation.
A sender reputation is built over time. A new platform with a new sending domain starts at neutral. If you immediately send a high-volume campaign to a list with any proportion of dead email addresses, spam traps, or disengaged contacts, inbox providers flag the sending domain as suspicious and your deliverability drops.
The fix is a staged import and send sequence.
First, clean the list before you import. Run the exported CSV through an email validation service. Remove any addresses that are invalid, catch-all, or known spam traps. A clean list that gets high engagement builds sender reputation faster than a large list with low engagement.
Second, segment by engagement before importing. In your Mailchimp export, sort by date of last activity. Your most engaged contacts (opened or clicked in the last 90 days) go into a warm segment. Everyone else goes into a cold segment.
Third, import and email the warm segment first. Send the re-introduction message to warm contacts on day 1 through 3. Give it 48 hours. Check your open rate. If it is above 25%, your sender reputation is establishing well. Then begin emailing the cold segment in batches of 200 to 300 per day over the following week.
What do you send on day 1 to re-engage a cold list?
This is the email. Adapt the name and details.
Subject: Still working on homes in [City]? (Quick check-in from [Company Name])
Body:
Hey [First Name],
You’re getting this because you reached out to [Company Name] at some point. We helped with [service type], or you got an estimate from us.
We’re sending this to make sure you still want to hear from us. If you’d rather not, just reply “stop” and we’ll remove you.
If you’re a homeowner in [City] and you ever need [service], we’d love to be your first call.
We have a few openings this month if anything’s on your radar. Reply to this and we’ll get back to you today.
[Your Name] [Company Name] [Phone]
Keep it short. No images, no graphics, no marketing language. It reads like a personal email because it should. Personal-style emails from service businesses get 2x to 3x the open rate of designed newsletter templates (LeadExploder platform account data, 2024-2025).
What is the SMS re-engagement template for the same list?
For contacts who gave you a phone number, run this SMS simultaneously with the email re-engagement.
SMS template:
Hi [First Name], this is [Name] from [Company]. You got an estimate from us [timeframe] ago. We’re sending this to check in and let you know we still have your info. If you ever need [service type] again, text us here and we’ll get back to you same day. Reply STOP to opt out.
Keep the SMS under 160 characters where possible. Include the opt-out instruction. Send between 10 AM and 6 PM local time. Do not send on Sundays.
Data portability risks: what Mailchimp does not export cleanly
Before you cancel, understand what data does not survive the migration intact. This is the part Mailchimp’s own help documentation does not make obvious.
Automation enrollment status. If you have contacts currently enrolled in an active Mailchimp automation (for example, a 5-email welcome sequence they are halfway through), their enrollment status does not export. The CSV only tells you that the contact exists. It does not tell you they are on email 3 of 5 in a specific sequence. If you have contacts mid-automation, decide before migration whether to let those automations complete in Mailchimp before cancelling, or accept that those contacts will restart from the beginning when you migrate.
Contact journey stage. Mailchimp Customer Journeys (their automation builder) tracks which stage each contact is in across a branching flow. None of that stage data exports. You will know the contact exists, but not where they were in the journey. For most service businesses with simple sequences (welcome email, 3-email drip, done), this is a minor issue. For businesses with complex multi-branch automations, it can create re-engagement confusion.
Engagement score. Mailchimp calculates an internal engagement score for each contact based on their open and click history. This score does not export. You can approximate it using the date of last activity field (contacts who opened in the last 90 days are effectively your high-engagement segment), but the raw score itself stays in Mailchimp.
What this means practically: export your list and import it, but keep Mailchimp active for 30 days after you start sending from the new platform. Let any in-progress automations complete. Then cancel.
How to handle contacts who will not provide a phone number for SMS
Not every contact on your list will migrate to SMS, and you should not force it.
Email-only contacts should stay on email. If someone never gave you a phone number, they opted into email communication. Moving them to SMS requires a new opt-in that you have not collected. Sending unsolicited SMS to contacts who gave you an email address is a compliance risk and will generate opt-outs and spam reports.
The right approach: keep email-only contacts on a separate email list and continue sending to them via email. Do not merge them into the SMS channel without collecting explicit consent. For future form submissions, add a phone number field with an SMS opt-in checkbox. Build your SMS list going forward from new contacts who actively consent.
For the portion of your list that has both email and phone number, run parallel campaigns: email and SMS on the re-engagement, then let contacts self-select which channel they prefer by observing which they engage with.
How to warm up the new platform’s sending reputation before blasting your full list
This is the step that most migrations skip and that causes the most deliverability damage.
When you start sending from a new platform, your sending domain has no reputation with inbox providers. Gmail, Outlook, and Apple Mail all use sender reputation signals (open rate, spam rate, engagement rate) to decide whether to deliver your email to the inbox or to the spam folder.
The warm-up process:
Week 1: Send only to your 200 most engaged contacts (opened within the last 30 days). Volume: 50 to 100 emails per day. Monitor deliverability. If open rates are above 25%, reputation is building.
Week 2: Expand to contacts who opened within the last 90 days. Volume: 200 to 500 emails per day.
Week 3: Include contacts who opened within the last 6 months. Volume: 500 to 1,000 per day.
Week 4 onward: Full list in normal broadcast cadence.
If you skip warm-up and blast 2,400 contacts from a brand new sending domain on day one, expect 30 to 50% of that send to land in spam folders. That damages your reputation further and makes recovery difficult.
The full stack comparison covers the total monthly cost of your Mailchimp subscription alongside the other tools in your stack, which is the right frame for the ROI calculation on migration. And if you are evaluating whether to move your entire funnel, not just your email list, the post on switching off ClickFunnels walks through a structured 7-day migration plan for businesses that have their email, landing pages, and contacts all in one platform.
What is honest about what won’t survive the migration?
Some contacts will not make the move, and that is fine.
Email-only contacts who never gave you a phone number will not benefit from SMS. They stay on your email list. If they are disengaged email subscribers with no phone number, they are unlikely to become customers, and removing them actually improves your deliverability.
Contacts who unsubscribed in Mailchimp will not receive any communication in the new platform. Those contacts are gone, and that is legally correct.
Contacts with invalid or outdated email addresses (probably 5 to 15% of any list older than two years) will bounce. They should be suppressed after the first bounce and not re-sent to.
After a clean migration, Jason’s list went from 2,400 contacts to about 2,100 active contacts. His email open rate went from 18% to 24% because the dead weight was gone. His SMS engagement on the 1,100 contacts with phone numbers was 34%. Both numbers are better than what Mailchimp was delivering.
What to do this week
Log in to Mailchimp and run your last five campaigns. Look at open rate, click rate, and reply rate. If you are below 20% open rate and have a reply rate under 1%, your list is not doing what you are paying $65 per month for it to do.
Export the list this week. You do not need to cancel Mailchimp yet. Just get the data in your hands so you own it.
Then book a demo to see how SMS re-engagement on the same list compares to email. The numbers will show you what to do next.
Book a demo and see the full platform live.
Alex Rocha is the founder of Mastodon Marketing, a Houston-based growth agency that runs marketing for service businesses across 70+ client sites. He built LeadExploder as the operating system he wished his clients had on day one. Learn more about Alex →
Frequently asked questions
How do I export my Mailchimp list without losing subscriber data?
In Mailchimp, go to Audience, select All Contacts, then Export Audience. Choose the CSV format. On the export screen, select all fields including custom merge tags, tags, and unsubscribe status. The exported file will include email address, first name, last name, phone number if collected, tags, and opt-in status. Do this before you cancel, not after.
Will importing a Mailchimp list trigger spam filters on the new platform?
It can, if you import and immediately blast the full list with a high-volume campaign. Best practice is to import the list in segments, start with your most engaged contacts (opened in the last 90 days), and send a re-introduction message to warm the new sending infrastructure before going to your full list.
What happens to Mailchimp unsubscribes when I move to a new platform?
Your Mailchimp export includes an unsubscribe status column. When you import into a new platform, map that field to the opt-out status in the new system. Any contact marked as unsubscribed in Mailchimp should be marked as opted out in the new platform before you send anything. Never import unsubscribes as active contacts.
How do I re-engage a cold email list when I switch platforms?
Start with a permission-reset message: remind contacts who you are, what they signed up for, and what they can expect. Keep it short and offer something useful (a tip, a checklist, a discount). For service business lists, a two-way SMS re-engagement tends to outperform email on the same list by 2x to 3x in response rate, because SMS open rates run 90%+ versus 18 to 25% for email.
