Migrate from Opera 3 to Mailchimp

Opera 3 Sales Ledger customer records map to Mailchimp Members within the target audience. We extract the Account Reference (customer code), company name, address fields (Address Line 1, Address Line 2, Town, County, Postcode, Country), telephone and fax numbers, and credit limit. Email address from the linked Sales Ledger contact record is the required key field for Mailchimp import. Multi-currency customers retain the currency code as a Mailchimp merge field rather than a native setting, since Mailchimp does not store currency metadata on individual members.

Individual contact records from Opera 3's Sales Ledger link to parent customer accounts. We map first name, last name, email address (required for Mailchimp), telephone, mobile, job title, and notes. Opera 3 can store multiple contacts per customer account; each contact becomes a separate Mailchimp member with the customer account name stored as a merge field. Contacts without a valid email address are excluded from the Mailchimp import and flagged in the reconciliation report.

Purchase Ledger supplier records from Opera 3 are imported as Mailchimp members with a SUPP_TYPESUPPLIER tag only if the customer intends to use Mailchimp for supplier communications. Supplier name, contact name, and email map to standard Mailchimp member fields; address data maps to merge fields. If Mailchimp is used exclusively for customer marketing, suppliers are imported into a separate suppression-only audience or excluded entirely and added to the global exclude list.

The Sales Ledger Owner or Account Manager assigned to each Opera 3 customer or contact record maps to a Mailchimp Tag applied to the corresponding member. This allows the customer's marketing team to segment by account owner and assign campaign sends or automations per owner territory. Owner names with spaces or special characters are normalised to tag-safe formats. If Opera 3 stores multiple owners per account, each owner is applied as a separate tag.

Opera 3's built-in CRM module stores contact activity as text-based notes. These migrate to the Mailchimp Member Notes field, which supports up to 2,000 characters. Notes are merged in chronological order with timestamps preserved in the text. This provides historical context to the marketing team but does not create a structured activity timeline equivalent to Mailchimp's automation trigger events. Customers requiring marketing-triggered automations based on contact history must rebuild those triggers manually in Mailchimp automations post-migration.

Opera 3 does not natively track email unsubscribe or bounce status, but where customer contact records include a status flag or notes indicating bounced or opted-out contacts, we export these as a Mailchimp suppression list uploaded before the main member import. This prevents accidentally re-subscribing bounced or opted-out addresses, which damages deliverability and can trigger Mailchimp's abuse detection system.

Opera 3 supports multiple company codes within a single installation, each with its own Sales Ledger. Where the migration scope includes more than one Opera 3 company code, we create a separate Mailchimp Audience for each company. Customer and contact records are mapped into the corresponding audience, preserving the company reference as an audience-specific tag or merge field. This prevents cross-company contact mixing and allows separate subscription preferences and campaign tracking per legal entity.

Opera 3 stores customer addresses as separate fields (Address Line 1, Address Line 2, Town, County, Postcode, Country). Mailchimp's ADDRESS merge field type consolidates these into a single structured field. We map each Opera 3 address component to the corresponding Mailchimp ADDRESS field part (addr1, addr2, city, state, zip, country). County maps to state for UK addresses, or to a custom merge field if the customer requires UK-specific county-level granularity.

Opera 3's OPUS add-on and bespoke Visual FoxPro schema modifications may introduce customer-specific fields not present in the standard Sales Ledger export. We document every unmapped custom field during discovery and create corresponding Mailchimp merge fields (text, number, or date type) in the target audience before import. Merge field names are normalised to Mailchimp's tag-safe alphanumeric format. Fields exceeding Mailchimp's 255-character text limit are flagged for splitting or truncating based on the customer's preference.