Migrate from Spark CRM to Mailchimp

Spark contacts map one-to-one to Mailchimp audience members. The email address serves as the unique identifier in both systems. During the pre-migration validation phase, Spark contacts missing a valid email address are identified and excluded from the migration batch. These skipped records are flagged in a pre-migration validation report so you can review and decide how to handle them before the migration commit.

Spark companies are not a native Mailchimp object. We map the company name to a COMPANY merge field on each audience member record. Multi-company contacts (Spark N:1) use only the primary company value; secondary associations are preserved as a comma-separated CUSTOM_COMPANIES merge field.

Spark contact tags migrate as Mailchimp audience tags on a one-to-one basis. Tag names are preserved exactly as they appear in Spark, including capitalization and spacing. When a Spark contact carries multiple tags, all corresponding Mailchimp tags are applied to the audience member record during migration. Any tags in Spark that exist but have no contacts associated with them are documented separately in the migration manifest for your records.

Each Spark custom field on a contact creates a corresponding Mailchimp merge field. Field type determines the Mailchimp merge field type: text fields become TEXT, numeric fields become NUMBER, date fields become DATE, phone fields become PHONE. Multi-select Spark fields become Mailchimp checkboxes groups. Merge field tag names use the Spark field name in uppercase, truncated to 10 characters if needed.

Spark company-level custom fields map to merge fields on the audience member using a COMPANY_ prefix in the merge tag name to distinguish them from contact-level custom fields. Industry, employee count, and annual revenue from Spark companies migrate to the corresponding merge fields if they exist as Spark company properties.

Mailchimp has no deal, opportunity, or pipeline object. Deal name, amount, stage, and close date from Spark cannot map to a functional equivalent in Mailchimp. We preserve deal data as a JSON-formatted NOTES merge field for reference, but the business process it represents must be rebuilt or abandoned.

Mailchimp only tracks email engagement (opens, clicks) automatically. Call logs, meeting records, and email threads from Spark cannot migrate. Original activity timestamps and owner information are preserved as a JSON NOTES field on the contact if legally permissible and if the data is not subject to export restrictions.

Spark owner assignment by email has no Mailchimp equivalent — Mailchimp audience members are not assigned to specific users. Owner email is preserved as an OWNER_EMAIL merge field for reference and audit purposes, but no Mailchimp user can be designated as the record owner.

Mailchimp does not provide native storage for file attachments on contact records. Spark file attachments linked to contacts or companies are therefore excluded from the migration entirely. If attachments are critical to your business process, you should export them to an external storage platform such as Google Drive or Dropbox and create a URL merge field in Mailchimp manually after migration to preserve links to those files.

Mailchimp automatically assigns a member-since date when a contact first subscribes to the audience, which would typically be set at migration time rather than reflecting the original Spark creation date. To preserve the actual customer onboarding timeline for reporting purposes, we create a custom DATE merge field named SPARK_CREATED and populate it with the original Spark contact creation timestamp from each record.