Migrate from folk to Mailchimp

folk Contacts migrate as Mailchimp Subscribers within an Audience. The Contact subtype (person vs company) is preserved as a custom merge field subtype__c since Mailchimp does not have a native company record. Standard fields (email, first_name, last_name, phone) map directly. Any Contact without an email address is flagged as undeliverable and excluded from import; the customer receives a count of contacts without email for manual review.

Each folk Group migrates to a Mailchimp Audience. The Group name becomes the Audience name, and Group membership determines which Subscribers belong to which Audience. Mailchimp recommends a single-Audience strategy with Tags for segmentation over multiple Audiences, so during scoping we present the customer with the choice: one consolidated Audience with Tags mirroring Groups, or multiple Audiences mirroring the existing Group structure. The customer selects the strategy before migration begins.

folk custom fields defined per-group map to Mailchimp merge fields per Audience. Because folk allows different field schemas per Group, we enumerate every distinct field across all Groups during discovery and build a unified merge field schema. Fields present in some Groups but not others receive an empty value for contacts from Groups that lack that field. Mailchimp accepts up to 40 merge fields per Audience; we flag any Group with more than 40 distinct fields for field consolidation before migration.

All folk tags per Contact migrate as Mailchimp Tags on the corresponding Subscriber record. Tags are preserved as a string array and applied as individual Mailchimp Tags. If the same tag appears across multiple Groups with different intended meanings (possible due to folk's per-group field autonomy), we append the source Group name to disambiguate, e.g., lead-cold vs client-cold.

folk Companies are a Contact subtype stored as separate records. Mailchimp has no Company or Account object. We migrate Company records as Subscriber records with a company_name merge field, and link related person-type Contacts by populating a company_associated merge field. This creates a flat denormalized structure; any future Mailchimp CRM integration (e.g., via Zapier or native sync) would need to re-establish the relationship.

folk Notes attached to Contacts can be preserved as Mailchimp Tags with the note text in the tag name (limited to 100 characters) or as a text merge field. We recommend the tag approach for short notes and a dedicated notes__c merge field for longer content, limited to Mailchimp's 255-character merge field constraint. Notes exceeding 255 characters are flagged for the customer to review post-migration.

folk Reminders with due dates and assignees have no Mailchimp equivalent. We migrate Reminder text as a Mailchimp Tag prefixed with reminder- and the due date in YYYY-MM-DD format, e.g., reminder-2025-11-30. Assignee resolution requires the customer to map folk Owner emails to Mailchimp Subscriber emails, which may not overlap if the assignee is not an email contact. Unresolvable assignees are noted in the migration report.

folk Pipeline Views and associated Deal stages have no Mailchimp equivalent. Mailchimp is an email marketing platform, not a sales CRM. We document every Pipeline View, its stage names, probability values, and associated Deals in a written handoff document for the customer's admin. If the customer requires deal tracking post-migration, we recommend evaluating Pipedrive, HubSpot, or a separate CRM that Mailchimp integrates with via Zapier or native sync.

folk Deals with associated values, stages, owners, and linked Contacts do not map to Mailchimp. We extract Deal records as a CSV inventory alongside the migration, documenting Deal value, stage, owner, and associated Contact emails for the customer's records. Any future deal tracking requires a separate CRM platform.

folk email campaign data—sent count, open rate, click rate, unsubscribe count—is stored in folk's campaign engine and not accessible via CSV export. We do not migrate campaign performance history. We migrate the contact list associated with each campaign so that the campaign audience is available in Mailchimp, but campaign analytics must be rebuilt from Mailchimp sends post-migration.