Mailchimp Export Contacts Tutorial: Manual and Automated Options Explained

In most cases, users export contacts from Mailchimp in order to upload this data to another tool or app. You can also export this data to create a backup copy of your contacts. Another possible purpose is to share Mailchimp contacts with stakeholders, of course, providing this is in compliance with GDPR or other rules for personal data protection. 

How can you do this? In this article, we’ll answer the most important questions about Mailchimp export contacts. Let’s go then!

Export contacts from Mailchimp – which options are available?

As you know, the Mailchimp Audience is where all your contacts are collected. Here you can manage contacts and export them. The native exporting option allows you to download the contact data as a CSV file to your device. In this way, you can also separately export the groups of contacts. The method works well, but it’s a manual option meaning that you’ll have to do this again and again to get the latest records.

An alternative way is to export Mailchimp contacts to Excel or Google Sheets on a schedule, like every day or every hour. The idea is that you can automate the workflow with a few clicks and forget about the manual routine. Another benefit is that you can set up filters or other data transformations in the spreadsheet to get the exact data you need. For example, only subscribed contacts, added in 2022, from Canada, etc. 

We’re going to introduce each way in detail. However, if you already know which way suits your purpose best then feel free to jump right to it.

How to export all contacts from Mailchimp

• Go to the Mailchimp Audience, select All contacts, then click Export Audience.

• The Audience exports page will open where you’ll see the Export As CSV button to download the file to your device. 

You’ll also get an email with the Download List Data button which leads to the download page. 

The next step is to click the button either on the page or in the email. For the latter, you have to be logged in to Mailchimp for the download to start.

As a result, a ZIP file containing one or a few CSV files will be downloaded to your device. Why a few files? When you use the Mailchimp export all contacts option, the contacts data is grouped by the email marketing status: Subscribed, Unsubscribed, and Cleaned.

Mailchimp export group contacts

If you want to export Mailchimp contacts of a specific group, you can do the following:

• Go to Audience => All contacts => Manage contacts => Groups

• Then select a category and a group in this category from which you want to export Mailchimp contacts:

Note: The number of contacts displayed for each group on this page corresponds to the number of contacts with the Subscribed status.

• Once you’ve opened a group, click the Export Segment button

• The Audience exports page will open where you’ll see the Export As CSV button to download the data of a contact group to your device. 

Click the button to download a ZIP file with one or a few CSV files to your device.

Limitations of exporting contacts as CSV from Mailchimp

The manual method for the Mailchimp export contacts is a good solution if you need to load Mailchimp contacts to some other app. However, you should be aware of certain limitations or drawbacks associated with this method:

• You won’t get a single CSV file with all the data but several files with contact records grouped by status. 
• Campaign engagement metrics are not included along with other valuable data such as email client, sign-up source, etc.
• You’ll have to repeat the exporting workflow every time you need to refresh your contact data.

So, it seems it’s not the ideal option if you need to export data on a regular basis, for example, for reporting or analytics. Besides, you can’t change the file format to export Mailchimp contacts to Excel. This is why we’d like to introduce a way to automate this workflow on a schedule with a few clicks.

How to export contacts from Mailchimp on a schedule

We will use Coupler.io to automate Mailchimp export contacts. Coupler.io is a data integration tool to schedule imports of data from multiple sources into Google Sheets, Excel, and BigQuery. In addition to Mailchimp, you can load data from HubSpot, Airtable, and many other applications.

As an example, let’s connect Mailchimp to Google Sheets. For this, sign up to Coupler.io with your Google or Microsoft account and click Add new importer. Select the respective source and destination applications:

Click Proceed to complete the following steps:

Configure source

• Connect your Mailchimp account.
• Select Contacts as the data entity and select your Mailchimp audience.

Configure destination

• Connect your Google account
• Select a Google Sheets document on your Google Drive and specify a sheet to load data to. You can create a new sheet by typing a new name.

Note: Read the Coupler.io documentation to learn more about the optional features.

Configure schedule

Enable the Automatic data refresh and set up a frequency for your automated export of Mailchimp contacts. You can schedule exports at a frequency from every month to every 15 minutes.

In the end, click Save and Run to make it work. There you go!

You get the raw data of all your Mailchimp contacts to Google Sheets where you can filter it by status, group, or another parameter, and manipulate the data in many other ways. Meanwhile, you can rest assured that the data will be updated automatically according to your chosen schedule.

Note: It’s also important to emphasize that you’ll get much more insights compared to the CSV export. With Coupler.io, your contacts data will include stats and metrics, for example, average click rate and total revenue, location details, last note records, and many more.

Export contacts in Mailchimp: subscribed, unsubscribed, and cleaned

You might be looking for the best way to export Mailchimp contacts grouped by their email marketing status: subscribed, unsubscribed, and cleaned. You won’t have any trouble with this since the native functionality already provides this sort of grouping by default. With Coupler.io, you can get what you need as well.

How to export unsubscribed contacts from Mailchimp

Follow the steps that we’ve covered in the section How to export all contacts from Mailchimp. The final action is to download a ZIP file, which will contain CSV data about your Mailchimp contacts grouped by their status including the unsubscribed contacts.

If you export contacts from Mailchimp using Coupler.io, then you can just filter the data by the status ‘Unsubscribed’. For example, if you use Google Sheets as a data destination, click Create a filter:

Then filter the status column by the value ‘Unsubscribed’.

There you go:

How to export subscribed contacts from Mailchimp

If you manually export Mailchimp contacts, you’ll get subscribed contacts grouped into a separate CSV file as described above. If you use Coupler.io, filter your exported records by the status ‘Subscribed‘ similar to how we did this in the previous section.

How to do the Mailchimp export of cleaned contacts

If you manually export contacts as CSV, you’ll get a separate CSV file containing data about the cleaned contacts. With Coupler.io, you can simply filter the necessary records.

What else can you export from Mailchimp?

So, we’ve introduced two methods to export contacts from Mailchimp: the manual and automated ones. Now you can decide which of these is the best fit for your needs. And if you choose to go with Coupler.io, you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

The thing is that as well as contacts, Coupler.io also allows you to export data about campaigns, clients, activities, and other entities. This can be extremely useful for your analytical or reporting purposes, especially if you need to export your data from Mailchimp to BigQuery. We hope you found this useful and good luck with your data!