How to export your contacts from Mailchimp

Your audience is yours — Mailchimp agrees, and exporting it is genuinely straightforward. Whether you're leaving, consolidating tools, or just keeping a backup, here's the clean way out.

What exports from Mailchimp

An audience export gives you a CSV with your contacts' email addresses, merge fields (first name, phone, and any custom fields you added), tags, and subscription status. As of August 2026 the export lives in the audience management area — Mailchimp's help center has the current click path, and it moves occasionally, so we won't pretend a screenshot from today will match your screen.

Three things worth knowing before you press export:

1. Export each audience separately. If you've accumulated multiple audiences over the years, each one exports on its own. This is a good moment to finally merge them — most platforms (ours included) put every import into one contact list, which is where they should have been all along.
2. Include the subscription status columns. The opt-in data is the legally important part of the file. Subscribed, unsubscribed, and non-subscribed contacts should stay distinguishable after the move.
3. Tags export as a column. Your segmentation work isn't lost — tags land in the CSV and can become segment rules on the other side.

What doesn't carry over

Be realistic about the other half: email templates and customer journeys don't transfer — not to us, not to anyone. Templates rebuild in any drag-and-drop builder; most small-business journeys are a welcome, a reminder, and a win-back, and those rebuild in an afternoon. Reports stay behind too, so export any numbers you'll want to cite later.

Importing your list into AutoCampaign.ai

Wherever you land, the import side is the easy half here: upload the CSV or Excel file, map your columns once, and tags and custom fields become attributes you can segment on immediately. Opt-in status is recorded on every imported contact, STOP requests are honored automatically from the first send, and your first campaign shows its estimated cost before you press send.

If you're still deciding where to go, our Mailchimp comparison is the honest version — including the cases where staying put is the right call. The pricing grid is public, so you can do the math before you create an account.