Migrate from Teleos to Mailchimp

Teleos stores an owner name, email address, phone number, and postal address on each client contact record. Mailchimp treats email as the unique identifier; name splits into FNAME and LNAME merge fields. We map Teleos email to Mailchimp EMAIL, firstname to FNAME, lastname to LNAME, and phone to PHONE merge fields. Contacts without a valid email address are excluded and reported in a skip-list.

Teleos stores address as a compound field. Mailchimp uses separate ADDRESS, CITY, STATE, ZIP, and COUNTRY merge fields. We parse the Teleos address string, split it into components, and populate each Mailchimp merge field individually. Malformed addresses that cannot be split cleanly are preserved as a single custom merge field and flagged for manual review.

Teleos patient records (species, breed, service type: vaccination, dental, surgical) are linked to the owner Contact. We extract the most recent service type per patient and apply a corresponding Mailchimp tag (e.g., 'Vaccination-Interest', 'Dental-Service') to the owner subscriber record. Each distinct Teleos service-type value becomes a tag value; contacts with multiple patients receive multiple tags.

Teleos allows practices to define custom properties on contacts (e.g., 'Marketing-Opt-In', 'Preferred-Contact-Method'). We map each custom property to a Mailchimp merge field if the property is a single value, or to a tag if it is a multi-select. Mailchimp limits audiences to 40 merge fields — if the custom property count exceeds this, overflow properties map to tags and are noted in the migration plan.

Mailchimp has no native last-visit concept. We create a custom merge field LAST_VISIT_DATE__c (using Mailchimp's naming convention for extra fields) to preserve the most recent Teleos appointment date per contact for use in re-engagement segmentation. Date format is ISO 8601 (YYYY-MM-DD) in Mailchimp.

Teleos appointment dates and statuses are extracted and mapped as time-bounded tags on the owner contact. A contact with a Teleos appointment in the next 7 days gets tag 'Appointment-Upcoming'. Completed appointments within the last 90 days get tag 'Recently-Served'. Tags enable Mailchimp segmentation for appointment-reminder and follow-up Customer Journeys.

Teleos stores a 'Do-Not-Email' flag on contacts who have requested no marketing contact. We export those contacts as a Mailchimp suppression-list CSV and import them before the main contact load so Mailchimp marks them as unsubscribed from the start. This prevents accidentally mailing contacts who previously opted out in Teleos.

Teleos supports multi-branch practice structures where a single Company record holds multiple branch locations. We map branch locations to Mailchimp groups within a single audience by default. If the practice prefers strict audience isolation per branch (e.g., for separate email-sending domains), we create separate Mailchimp audiences — one per branch — and map accordingly. The choice is confirmed during migration planning.

Teleos invoice history and billing totals have no meaningful equivalent in Mailchimp's contact model. We export Teleos invoice summaries as a linked CSV keyed on the contact email address, which can be imported into a separate analytics tool or joined to Mailchimp contact data via the email key for reporting purposes. This export is delivered alongside the Mailchimp migration but is not imported into Mailchimp itself.

Patient clinical notes and chart data in Teleos are clinical records that Mailchimp is not designed to store or display. These records do not migrate. We deliver a separate export of patient chart metadata (patient name, species, last-visit summary) as a CSV so the practice retains the information for reference outside Mailchimp.

If Teleos captured intake form data (e.g., new-client intake, consent forms) linked to contacts, we extract the form submission date and source as a tag 'Source-Intake-Form' on the subscriber record. This preserves the acquisition context for segmentation without importing the full form payload into Mailchimp.

Teleos assigns an internal owner/contact ID to each record. Mailchimp does not natively expose a custom external-ID field on the contact record. We store the Teleos owner ID in the Mailchimp contact's NOTES field as 'Teleos-Owner-ID: {id}' so the practice can cross-reference records after migration. This also enables delta-run deduplication.