Migrate from Basic Online CRM to Mailchimp

Basic Online CRM Contacts map directly to Mailchimp Audience Members. We extract name, email, phone, and address fields into a CSV and import via Mailchimp's standard contact import. Any non-standard fields from Basic Online CRM become Mailchimp merge fields (FNAME, LNAME, PHONE, COMPANY, and up to 40 custom merge fields on paid plans). Email opt-in status is inferred as subscribed for migrated contacts unless a contact explicitly unsubscribed in Basic Online CRM, in which case their status is set to unsubscribed at import time.

Basic Online CRM Companies do not have a direct Mailchimp equivalent because Mailchimp is contact-centric and does not maintain a separate company object. We offer two strategies during scoping: map the Company name to a COMPANY merge field on each Audience Member, or apply a Tag for each unique Company name so contacts from the same company can be filtered by segment. The customer chooses the strategy before migration. Duplicate company names across contacts result in a single tag per unique company name.

Mailchimp has no Deal or opportunity object. Deal data cannot migrate as structured records. We offer a tag-based workaround: we extract Deal stage values from Basic Online CRM's export, resolve the internal Contact ID references, and apply Tags of the form deal_stage:StageName to each migrated Audience Member. A contact linked to multiple Deals receives multiple tags. Closed-won and closed-lost status is encoded as deal_status:won or deal_status:lost tags. This preserves Deal context for segmentation but requires the customer to review and validate in Mailchimp post-migration.

If the customer chooses to preserve Deal monetary values, we map the Deal amount to a custom numeric merge field DEALAMOUNT on the Audience Member. This field can be used in Mailchimp merge tags for dynamic content but does not function as a pipeline or CRM value; it is informational only. The customer must decide during scoping whether Deal amounts are meaningful enough to carry over as contact-level data.

Basic Online CRM Notes are free-text entries with no timestamps on the free plan. Mailchimp does not store a chronological note history per contact. We apply Notes content as Tags of the form note:First50Characters so that note context surfaces in the contact profile as a tag. Full note text is preserved in a migration summary document for admin reference. If Notes contain action items, these must be recreated as Mailchimp Customer Journey automations or managed outside the platform.

Basic Online CRM custom fields are untyped and exported as strings. We migrate them as Mailchimp text merge fields (type TEXT). The customer validates intended data types during scoping because date fields exported as strings from Basic Online CRM may require reformatting to YYYY-MM-DD for Mailchimp date merge fields. Number fields migrate as text but can be used in numeric merge tag conditions for segmentation. Dropdown fields from Basic Online CRM become Mailchimp text merge fields unless the customer specifies they should be encoded as Tags for filtering.

Basic Online CRM does not surface record-level owner assignment in its CSV exports, and Mailchimp does not have a record-owner model. Team access in Mailchimp is account-wide rather than per-record. We ask the customer during scoping to identify any owner context they want preserved and map it to a OWNER merge field or Tag on the contact record. This is informational only and does not enable role-based access control.

Basic Online CRM does not store file attachments natively. Any documents referenced in Notes or Deal descriptions must be sourced externally and re-uploaded after migration. We include a pre-migration checklist asking customers to identify and inventory any such files before the migration window.