Import Mailchimp Contacts

Bring an existing Mailchimp audience into Marketing → Audience by uploading the export Mailchimp already gives you. Haven reads each contact's subscribed, unsubscribed, cleaned, or non-subscribed status from the file. It does not invent a consent date, and it will not re-subscribe someone who already unsubscribed from your Haven marketing.

When to Use This

• You already collected consent in Mailchimp and want those people in Haven's Audience.
• You are moving off Mailchimp and need subscribed, unsubscribed, and cleaned contacts to keep their meaning.
• You have an SMS audience folder in the same export and want list SMS recorded separately from email.

How to Import a Mailchimp Audience

Step 1: Export from Mailchimp

In Mailchimp, open the audience and export it. The usual download is a ZIP with files named like subscribed_members_export_…, unsubscribed_members_export_…, cleaned_members_export_…, and nonsubscribed_members_export_…. A single CSV works if it has a Status column or one of those filenames.

Step 2: Open Import in Haven

Go to Host Dashboard → Marketing → Audience and choose Import contacts. Select Mailchimp export, then upload the ZIP or CSV.

Step 3: Confirm each file's status

Haven shows one row per file and the status it read from the filename or a Status column. If a file has neither, you must choose the status yourself. Haven will not guess.

Step 4: Affirm and import

Tick the Mailchimp-specific consent statement, choose a segment if you want one, and complete the import. At most 5,000 rows per upload.

How Consent Is Recorded

• Subscribed — opted in. If the file has a confirm time, Haven stores that as written consent. Otherwise it uses the opt-in time. If both are missing, the contact is still opted in and the date is left blank.
• Unsubscribed — opted out, and the address is suppressed for marketing email. A later subscribed file cannot undo that.
• Cleaned — transactional only, and the address is treated as a hard bounce.
• Non-subscribed — transactional only. They are in your CRM; they are not subscribed to marketing.

SMS rows in the export write SMS consent on that contact. Email consent and SMS consent stay separate.

Matching and Merging

Haven identifies a contact by email (case-insensitive). The same address in your file and in Audience is one contact — a re-import never creates a second row.

When the file and Audience both have data for that person, Haven keeps the richer value from either side:

• A full name wins over an initial; an empty name never clears one you already have
• A more complete phone number wins; a missing phone never clears a stored one
• Tags from the file are added to tags already on the contact
• A country code already on the contact is kept unless the file has a two-letter ISO code and the stored value is only a country name
• Stay dates already in Haven are left alone — a Mailchimp export does not carry stays

Consent still follows the rules above. A subscribed row cannot re-subscribe someone who already unsubscribed in Haven.

What This Does Not Do

• It does not connect Mailchimp over OAuth or keep the two lists in sync.
• It does not re-subscribe a contact who already unsubscribed in Haven, or whose address is already suppressed.
• It does not turn a spreadsheet of emails into Mailchimp subscribers. Use the spreadsheet import for that, which never marks people as opted in.

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