AudienceBench

How to Migrate from Mailchimp to Kit, Step by Step

Step-by-step Mailchimp to Kit migration from both vendors' docs: export and clean your audience, import, rebuild forms and automations, and switch over safely.

By AudienceBench Editorial · Published · Pricing & docs checked

Moving from Mailchimp to Kit is mostly a data job (getting your contacts across cleanly) followed by a rebuild job (forms, templates, and automations don’t transfer automatically). This guide walks through both in order, based on Kit’s official Mailchimp migration guide and Mailchimp’s own help docs, checked on September 27, 2026.

Note: We haven’t run this migration end-to-end on our own account yet. The steps below come from official Kit and Mailchimp documentation. We’ll add screenshots once we’ve run the migration on real accounts.

Short on time? Kit offers a free migration service on its paid plans: its in-house team will move your subscribers and rebuild forms, templates, and automations for you (Kit pricing FAQ). If you’d rather do it yourself, or want to understand what they’ll do, read on.

Moving to beehiiv instead? If you want a newsletter publication platform rather than a creator email tool, see How to migrate from Mailchimp to beehiiv.

Before you start: pick the right Kit plan

Your Mailchimp setup determines which Kit plan you need:

  • Kit Free (up to 10,000 subscribers) includes unlimited forms, landing pages, and broadcasts, plus tagging and segmentation. It does not include email sequences or visual automations.
  • Kit Creator (from $39/month billed monthly, or $33/month billed yearly, at 1,000 subscribers) adds unlimited email sequences and visual automations, which you’ll need if you’re moving Mailchimp customer journeys or classic automations. It also comes with the free migration service.
  • Kit Pro adds unlimited users, deliverability reporting, and advanced A/B testing.

Prices from kit.com/pricing on September 27, 2026. Kit’s paid plans have a 14-day free trial with no credit card required, which is enough time to do a migration and test it.

Start a Kit account

Step 1: Take inventory of your Mailchimp account

Before touching anything, write down what you actually use. You’ll rebuild each item in Kit.

  • Audiences: how many, and roughly how many subscribed contacts in each
  • Tags, groups (interests), and segments you rely on
  • Merge fields (custom fields like first name, company, birthday)
  • Signup forms and landing pages, and where each one is embedded (website pages, link-in-bio, pop-ups)
  • Email templates you reuse
  • Customer journeys and classic automations, with every email and trigger
  • Integrations that push contacts into Mailchimp (e-commerce store, course platform, Zapier)

Step 2: Learn Kit’s vocabulary

Kit names things differently. This mapping comes straight from Kit’s migration guide:

What it isMailchimp calls itKit calls it
A person on your listContactSubscriber
Your collection of email addressesAudienceList
One-off emailRegular emailBroadcast
Automated series of emailsCampaign (in a customer journey or classic automation)Email Sequence
Actions triggered by behaviorCustomer journey / classic automationVisual Automation
Label on a subscriberTag / GroupTag
Filtered set of subscribersSegmentSegment

The big structural difference: Mailchimp lets you have multiple audiences. Kit has one list per account, and you organize subscribers with tags. If you have several Mailchimp audiences, they’ll end up in one Kit list, separated by tags.

Step 3: Back up your Mailchimp audience

Even if you use Kit’s automatic importer, export a backup first. Per Mailchimp’s export guide:

  1. Click Audience.
  2. If you have more than one audience, pick the one you want from the Audience drop-down.
  3. Click Export audience.
  4. In the Export all contacts? pop-up, click Export CSV. Mailchimp emails you when the export is ready.

Things worth knowing about the export:

  • Only Owners and Admins can export audiences.
  • The download may be a ZIP file with separate CSVs for subscribed, unsubscribed, non-subscribed, and cleaned contacts.
  • Exports stay available in Mailchimp for 30 days (under More options > Export history).
  • Exports don’t include email engagement data (opens and clicks), signup source, or purchase history. If you want that history, export your email reports separately before you close the account.

Repeat for each audience. Keep the files somewhere safe: this is your rollback plan.

Step 4: Import your contacts into Kit

You have two options.

Kit’s importer connects to Mailchimp with an API key and pulls contacts and their data across. According to Kit’s guide:

  • Merge fields come over as custom fields, mapped automatically.
  • Tags are created from your list (audience) names, your existing Mailchimp tags, and your list + interest group combinations. For example, a “Newsletter” audience with a “Tech” interest group becomes a Kit tag called Newsletter:Tech.

First, create a Mailchimp API key (Mailchimp: About API Keys):

  1. In Mailchimp, click your profile icon and choose Profile.
  2. Click the Extras drop-down, then choose API keys.
  3. Under Your API Keys, click Create A Key.
  4. Give it a descriptive name, like “Kit migration.”
  5. Click Generate Key, then Copy Key to Clipboard. You can only see the full key once.

API keys grant full access to your Mailchimp account, so treat this like a password: don’t email it or show it in screenshots. (Mailchimp also notes that keys created on or after June 22, 2026 expire after one year.)

Then run the importer in Kit:

  1. Go to the Subscribers page.
  2. Click Add Subscribers, then Other provider.
  3. Choose Mailchimp.
  4. Paste your Mailchimp API key and follow the prompts.

Option B: CSV import

Use this if you want full control over exactly who gets imported. From Kit’s import guide:

  1. Prepare your file. Use the subscribed CSV from your Mailchimp export. Don’t import the unsubscribed or cleaned files. Those people opted out or have addresses that bounced (Mailchimp’s definition of “cleaned”), and emailing them hurts your sender reputation. You need an email column and header row; add a column of comma-separated tags if you want to import tags.
  2. On the Subscribers page, click Add Subscribers > Import CSV.
  3. Upload your CSV.
  4. Map columns to fields. Choose an existing Kit field or type a name to create a new custom field. Map your tags column to “Comma-separated list of tags.” Unmapped columns are not imported.
  5. Optionally add everyone to a tag, form, or sequence. Kit suggests a tag named “Imported [date and time],” which is worth keeping so you can find this batch later.
  6. Click Start import. Kit emails you when it finishes.

Two warnings from Kit’s docs:

  • Blank values overwrite existing data. If a subscriber already exists in Kit and your CSV has a blank first name, Kit replaces their stored first name with a blank. (Existing tags are never removed, only added.)
  • Imports can trigger automations. Adding imported subscribers to a tag or form can start any Visual Automation or Rule that uses that tag or form as a trigger, and adding them to a sequence starts the sequence. Pause automations before importing if you don’t want that.

Step 5: Rebuild your forms and landing pages

  1. In Kit, go to Audience growth > Landing Pages & Forms.
  2. Pick the template closest to your Mailchimp form or page.
  3. Customize it in Kit’s builder. Kit says exact design matches aren’t always possible because the builders differ.
  4. Replace every Mailchimp embed on your website, link-in-bio, and anywhere else from your Step 1 inventory. Missing one means new signups keep landing in Mailchimp.

Tip: when you create each Kit form, set it to apply the same tag your Mailchimp form used, so new subscribers are organized the same way as imported ones.

Step 6: Recreate your email templates

  1. In Kit, click Broadcasts, then Templates.
  2. Choose the closest starting template and edit it in the visual template editor.
  3. Add the parts that stay the same in every email: logo, section headings, and body font settings.

Kit also supports custom HTML/CSS templates if you’re comfortable with code.

Step 7: Rebuild automated emails as Sequences

Kit’s guide defines a “Mailchimp campaign” here as the automated emails inside a customer journey or classic automation. (Your one-off newsletters become Broadcasts in Kit.)

  1. Go to Automation > Email Sequences and click + New sequence.
  2. Choose a default template.
  3. Copy and paste each Mailchimp email’s content into a sequence email.
  4. Recreate the send schedule (for example: immediately, then 2 days later, then 5 days later).

Email content doesn’t transfer automatically, so budget time for this step if you have long sequences.

Step 8: Rebuild customer journeys as Visual Automations

  1. Go to Automation > Visual Automations.
  2. Recreate the journey’s starting point (for example, “subscribes to form X” or “is tagged Y”) as the automation’s entry point.
  3. Add steps that mirror your Mailchimp rules and actions (customer journeys) or emails and post-send actions (classic automations). Where Mailchimp sent a campaign, add a step that sends the Kit Email Sequence you built in Step 7.

Step 9: Test everything

Kit recommends testing before you switch over:

  • Preview forms and landing pages, ideally live on your website.
  • Send yourself test emails from each sequence, or preview them in the sequence editor.
  • Run through each Visual Automation by subscribing to your own form with a test email address and watching what happens.

Also check that a few imported subscribers have the right tags and custom field values.

Step 10: Switch over and wind down Mailchimp

A sensible order:

  1. Make sure every signup path points to Kit (forms, landing pages, integrations from your inventory).
  2. Turn off Mailchimp automations so nobody gets emails from both platforms.
  3. Send your first Kit broadcast. Consider a short “we’ve moved” note so readers know to expect your emails from a new sender setup.
  4. Revoke the Mailchimp API key you created for the migration (Profile > Extras > API keys > Revoke).
  5. Keep your Mailchimp export files, and export any reports you want, before downgrading or closing your Mailchimp account.

Common mistakes to avoid

  • Importing unsubscribed or cleaned contacts from the Mailchimp ZIP file.
  • Forgetting to pause automations before an import that adds tags, forms, or sequences.
  • Blank CSV cells overwriting good data on existing Kit subscribers.
  • Leaving an old Mailchimp form live on a forgotten page.
  • Expecting multiple audiences to stay separate. In Kit they become tags on one list; the same person in two Mailchimp audiences becomes one Kit subscriber. Kit counts unique active subscribers for billing.

Sources

All checked September 27, 2026.