Moving from another platform
Bring your contacts, your designs and — importantly — your opt-outs.
Most of a migration is one CSV and an afternoon. The order below is the one that avoids the two expensive mistakes: losing your unsubscribes, and cancelling the old account before this one can actually send.
The order to do it in
Export everything from the old platform
Contacts and your unsubscribe list — they are often separate downloads, and the second is the one people forget.
Import your contacts
Map a column to Lists and your groups rebuild as they import. How import works.
Import the opt-outs, with a status column
Set the status column to unsubscribed for those rows. See below — this step is not optional.
Set up your sending address
In Settings. If you used your own domain before, verify it here too. DNS can take a little while, so start it early.
Bring a design across
Give Penny an existing newsletter and she rebuilds it as an editable design — see below.
Send a small real campaign, then switch over
A few hundred engaged contacts. Confirm it arrives and looks right before you cancel anything.
Bring your opt-outs — this is the important one
Losing them is the one mistake that's hard to undo
Someone who unsubscribed from you last year and then receives your first email from a new platform will not unsubscribe again — they will report it as spam. Complaints are the most expensive event in email, and a first send is exactly when you can least afford them.
Import them as a file with a status column set to unsubscribed. They then sit in your account as a permanent record, excluded from everything, and safe against being re-added by a later import.
It is also a legal requirement in most places: an opt-out follows the person, not the tool you happened to be using.
Bringing designs across
From Campaigns → New campaign → Migrate, give Penny one of three things:
- The email’s “view in browser” link
- Its HTML, pasted
- A
.emlfile — in Gmail, open the message, ⋮ → Download message
She rebuilds it as editable blocks and copies the images into your own media library, so nothing breaks the day the old account goes away. It takes a few minutes on a long newsletter and keeps running if you look elsewhere.
Tracking links from the old platform are stripped and replaced with their real destinations — otherwise your campaign would record its clicks in someone else’s account. Where a destination can’t be recovered, you’re told which links to replace by hand.
What doesn't come across
- Past campaign statistics. Opens and clicks live with the platform that sent them. Export any reports you want to keep before you close the account.
- Automations. Rebuild them here — the starter templates cover the usual shapes.
- Your sending reputation. It doesn’t transfer between platforms. Start with your most engaged contacts and build up.
Common issues
Lots of contacts were rejected
Old lists accumulate dead domains. Read the rejected-rows CSV — if most failures are addresses that can’t receive mail, the import saved you from a bounce problem.
My first send here performed worse
Normal, and temporary. Reputation is per-platform. Mail your engaged contacts first and it recovers.
The migrated design doesn't look identical
It’s a rebuild into editable blocks, not a pixel copy — which is what makes it editable. Expect to tidy spacing.
FAQs
Should I keep the old account running for a while?+
Yes. Keep it until you’ve sent a real campaign here and checked the results. Cancelling first is how people discover a DNS record they hadn’t finished.
Can I import from several platforms at once?+
Yes — import each file separately. Contacts are matched on email, so an address in two files becomes one contact rather than a duplicate.
Do I have to re-verify my domain?+
Yes. Domain verification is per-platform: each one publishes its own DNS records so mail signed by them is provably yours. Both can be verified at once, which is what lets you overlap.