Migrate from BigChange to Mailchimp

BigChange person records map 1:1 to Mailchimp contacts within an audience. Each BigChange contact email address becomes the Mailchimp email address field, serving as the unique identifier for the contact record. BigChange provides REST API access for extracting person records including custom fields. Contacts without email addresses are flagged for manual review before import, since Mailchimp requires a valid email address for marketing contacts.

BigChange company names are mapped to a COMPANY merge tag on each related contact. When a contact has multiple associated companies, the primary company name populates the merge tag field, and any additional company associations are appended as comma-separated values within that field or distributed across separate Tags for use in Mailchimp segmentation and filtering.

BigChange custom fields attached to person records, accessed via the quote_custom_fields API, require corresponding Mailchimp merge fields to be created in the audience before import begins. Standard plan accounts allow a maximum of 30 merge fields per audience, while Premium accounts permit up to 80 fields, so the field mapping must account for these limits during the planning phase.

BigChange supports multiple company associations per contact, but Mailchimp contacts can only have one primary company affiliation. The most recently modified company association is migrated as the primary COMPANY merge tag, and any secondary company associations are converted into Tags on the contact record using the format 'Secondary_Client_[CompanyName]' to preserve the relationship data within Mailchimp's structure.

BigChange phone number fields, including primary phone and mobile phone, map to Mailchimp's built-in PHONE merge tag. When contacts have multiple phone numbers recorded across different fields, FlitStack concatenates them into a single PHONE value or distributes them across separate custom fields depending on the available field budget in your Mailchimp plan.

Mailchimp's ADDRESS merge tag accepts structured components including city, state, ZIP, and country fields. BigChange address components are parsed and mapped to Mailchimp's standard address schema during import. For free-form address blocks that do not separate into individual components, the complete address is stored as a custom text field in Mailchimp.

BigChange job records containing scheduling information, status updates, and assigned engineer data have no native equivalent in Mailchimp's contact model. The most recent job status can be stored as a custom merge field on the contact record. The complete job history is exported as a structured CSV file linked by contact ID rather than loaded into Mailchimp's contact structure, preserving the full audit trail outside the platform.

BigChange quotes, invoices, and job costing records are document objects stored alongside contact records. Mailchimp does not support document attachments or line-item financial data on contacts. FlitStack exports quote metadata including values, status, dates, and reference numbers as merge fields for the most recent quote per contact. The complete financial document history is exported as a structured CSV file linked to BigChange record IDs for retrieval after migration.

When BigChange uses internal labels or tags to categorize contacts, those labels are mapped directly to Mailchimp Tags during the import process. Mailchimp Tags drive segmentation logic and can trigger Customer Journey automations based on tag membership, enabling the same categorization workflows to operate in the destination platform.

Mailchimp automatically records a MEMBER_SINCE date when a contact is added to an audience. To preserve the original customer relationship history from BigChange, the original create date from BigChange is stored in a custom datetime merge field on each contact, ensuring that reporting and analysis reflect the full timeline of when the customer relationship began in the source CRM.