Migrate from TOTUS Marketing to Mailchimp

Discovery and TOTUS API exploration

We begin by requesting API access to the customer's TOTUS Marketing instance or, if API access is unavailable, a full data export in whatever format TOTUS provides. We enumerate every object (Contacts, Companies, Deals, Pipelines, Tickets, custom objects), every standard and custom field, every relationship, and every active workflow or automation. If we discover undocumented or proprietary objects, we flag them immediately and ask the customer for schema context. This phase produces a TOTUS Data Inventory document that is the foundation for all subsequent mapping work. It typically takes one to two weeks.

Mailchimp audience and field scoping

We audit the customer's target Mailchimp account to identify existing Audiences, configured Merge Fields, existing Tags and Groups, and any automation structures already in place. We compare the TOTUS Data Inventory against the Mailchimp account to identify merge field name collisions (Mailchimp merge field names must be unique per Audience), character-length violations against the 255-character merge field limit, and any data types that require transformation (date formats, phone number formats, boolean values). We present the customer with a field-crosswalk table and a data-gap document before any migration code is written.

Email verification and contact cleanup

Before migrating any Member records to Mailchimp, we run the contact email list through a verification pass to catch hard bounces, spam traps, and malformed addresses. This step protects the customer's Mailchimp sender reputation, reduces the billed contact count, and avoids Mailchimp's automatic list cleaning that can delete records post-import. We provide a verified-clean contact list in CSV and JSON format and flag any records with missing email addresses for the customer's admin to supply or archive before migration proceeds.

Sandbox import and reconciliation

We perform a trial migration into a test Mailchimp Audience (or a temporary audience we create and delete after validation) using a representative subset of the contact data. We reconcile row counts, spot-check merge field values against the source TOTUS export, and validate that tag assignments and group memberships landed correctly. The customer reviews the test Audience and approves the mapping before production migration begins. Any corrections to merge field names, tag logic, or data transforms happen in this phase, not in production.

Production migration and delta capture

We migrate the full contact list into the production Mailchimp Audience using the verified mapping from the sandbox phase. Member records are inserted via the Mailchimp Members API with merge field values and tag assignments in a single request payload per record. We run a post-migration reconciliation comparing the Member count in Mailchimp against the source contact count in TOTUS, flagging any discrepancies for investigation. If the customer continues using TOTUS during the migration window, we capture a delta export of any new or modified contacts and apply them before cutover.

Automation inventory handoff and cutover

We deliver the written Workflow and Automation Inventory documenting every active TOTUS Workflow with its trigger conditions, actions, and a recommended Mailchimp Customer Journey builder equivalent. We include a brief Mailchimp automation rebuild guide so the customer's admin can replicate the logic without needing a separate consultant. We do not rebuild TOTUS Workflows in Mailchimp as part of the migration scope. We freeze TOTUS writes at cutover, verify the final Mailchimp Audience count, and close the migration project. We provide a 72-hour post-cutover support window for any immediate reconciliation issues.