MailChimp Tutorial: How to Import Email Addresses into Your MailChimp List, Part 1 of 2

In my previous MailChimp Tutorial, “Ways to Grow Your MailChimp List,” I reviewed seven strategies for adding email addresses to your MailChimp list. In this post, I am going to show you how to do one of those strategies: Importing email addresses into your list.

Let’s get clear about some things before we get started:

• This tutorial is right for you if you already have the following:
  • A MailChimp account.
    If you don’t already have a MailChimp account, read my tutorial, “Which Account is Right for me?”
  • A MailChimp list. This list doesn’t have to have any email addresses in it yet.
    If you don’t know how to do that or aren’t sure if you’ve set up your list correctly, visit my tutorial, “How to Set Up a MailChimp List.”
  • A bunch of email addresses in one system, like Gmail or another email marketing system, that you want to move into MailChimp in as few steps as possible.

Import Email Addresses into Your MailChimp List Using MailChimp Integrations

“Oh, um, what?” Is that what you think to yourself when you hear the word “integrations?” It’s okay. MailChimp integrations are fairly easy to use and this is because the instructions on how to use them are pretty clear and usually there are very few steps to activate the integration.

Let’s back up for a moment and clarify what is meant by “integration.” An integration means that MailChimp and some other system can talk directly to one another to do specific tasks.

To use an integration, you usually have to do something to get them to talk to one another and MailChimp will usually tell you exactly what to do to make the integration work.

Pro Tip

A pointer about integrations. Before you begin the integration process, I recommend opening three browser tabs.

1. In the first browser tab, sign into your MailChimp account.
2. In the second browser tab, sign into the service you wish to integrate with MailChimp.
   Example: If you want to import your Google Contacts, sign into Google in the second tab.
3. In the third browser tab open the integration instructions from MailChimp. I will provide direct links to a number of them in this tutorial.
4. If you work off of two screens, I highly recommend dragging the instructions tab to your other screen rather than having all three tabs open in the same browser window.

Here’s MailChimp Integration Options for Importing Your Email Addresses

If you see the service that you currently use to hold your email addresses listed below, click the link. Each link below will take you to the MailChimp instructions to import email addresses from that service into your MailChimp list.

• Import email addresses from Capsule
• Import email addresses from Constant Contact
• Import email addresses from Eventbrite
• Import email addresses from Freshbooks
• Import email addresses from Google Contacts
• Import email addresses from Google Drive
• Import email addresses from Salesforce
• Import email addresses from ZenDesk
• Import email addresses from Zoho
• Don’t see your service listed here?
  Try searching MailChimp’s Integrations directory.
  Just click this link and type the name of your service into the Search Integrations field.
• Still can’t find an integration for your service?
  Not to worry. My next MailChimp tutorial will demonstrate another way to import contacts.

Your Next Step

Give the MailChimp integration for your service a try. If you don’t see your service listed above, hang tight; my next tutorial should cover all other scenarios and I will link to it here.

The Next MailChimp Tutorial

As I mentioned above, the next tutorial will show another way to import email address into your MailChimp list. After that, we will start to get on with getting NEW subscribers signed up to your list. Fun! And totally necessary to keep your business stable and to grow your business to new heights.

Affiliate? Who me?

Please note that I am not a MailChimp affiliate. Likewise, I am not an affiliate for any other service I reference in this post. They are not paying me to talk about them. I like MailChimp. That’s it. As I write these tutorials, my goal is to share how I use MailChimp to grow my business so you can learn from my successes and failures and so I can become better at serving my clients by growing my expertise in email marketing.