Migrate from Reach to Mailchimp

Reach Contacts map directly to Mailchimp Members within a single consolidated Audience. We use the contact's email address as the primary key for deduplication and subscribe status. Any Reach contact property not matching a standard Mailchimp field is carried as a Merge Field. Unsubscribed or bounced contacts in Reach are imported with their original status preserved so Mailchimp's compliance handling applies correctly on day one.

Each Reach custom contact property discovered during export validation maps to a Mailchimp Merge Field. Mailchimp supports TEXT, NUMBER, DATE, PHONE, ADDRESS, IMAGE, and URL merge field types. We match the Reach property data type to the appropriate Mailchimp field type during discovery. Text merge fields are limited to 255 characters; any Reach property exceeding this limit is either split across multiple TEXT merge fields (first 255 / remainder) or stored as a NOTE attachment, with the customer choosing the strategy during scoping.

Reach tags and labels extract as a tag-equivalent column in the CSV export and map directly to Mailchimp Tags. Tags in Mailchimp are flat labels applied to Members and do not support hierarchy, so any Reach tags with parent-child relationships are flattened into dot-notation strings (e.g., Region.North.Agent). Mailchimp Tags are preserved exactly as named, with no character transformation, so admin-facing tag names from Reach remain legible in Mailchimp.

Reach does not expose a distinct Account or Company object; any company or organization data is stored as a contact property (likely a text field like company_name or business_name). We carry this as a TEXT Merge Field (company_name) in Mailchimp. If the customer has organized Reach contacts by organization with multiple contacts per org, we also create a corresponding Mailchimp Interest Category (group) so that organization-level affiliation is visible as a group membership on each Member record.

Reach stores digital content, playlists, and screen management assets tied to contact records. These are not standard contact data and have no direct Mailchimp equivalent. We extract any media-related URLs or attachment references found in the Reach export as NOTE records on the corresponding Member, pointing to the original Reach content URL. Actual media file binary transfer is out of scope; we preserve the reference, not the file.

Reach Enterprise tier documents a seat-license model with named admin and agent accounts. These user records are migratable to Mailchimp as team Members with appropriate permission roles. Mailchimp plans above Essentials support multiple user seats; we map Reach user roles (admin, agent) to Mailchimp permission levels (Admin, Author, Manager) based on the customer's chosen Mailchimp plan. User provisioning happens before contact migration so that owner assignments can be preserved.

The contact email address is the primary identifier in both Reach and Mailchimp. It maps directly to Mailchimp's EMAIL merge field, which is required for every Member. We validate email format during the import using Mailchimp's import troubleshooting criteria (syntax check, domain validation, UTF-8 prefix check) and flag any malformed addresses before inserting so they do not cause bounces on the first send.

Reach's contact subscription status (active, unsubscribed, bounced) maps to Mailchimp's Member Status field. We set the status explicitly during import rather than relying on Mailchimp's default subscribed status, so that any Reach contacts who unsubscribed are not re-subscribed without consent. Compliance status is preserved exactly as reported from Reach.