How to Transfer Subscribers from Feedburner to Mailchimp

So I get a lot of requests to design WordPress blogs for people who are transferring over from Blogger.  While I don’t do transfers myself (just not my area of expertise and there’s a lot that can go wrong), I know that one of the big issues clients run into is email subscriptions.  Blogger by default uses Feedburner to send out posts by email and part of the blog transfer is transferring the subscriptions, but what if you don’t want to use Feedburner anymore?  A lot of people prefer to use Mailchimp because there are more areas for customization on it and it offers a lot of extra services that Feedburner does not.  So how do you transfer your Feedburner subscribers to Mailchimp?  It’s not very hard to do and here are the steps you can take.

Step 1:
This tutorial assumes that you have already set up and configured your Mailchimp account.  If you have not already done this, you can follow my tutorial on How to Send Out Blog Posts via Mailchimp here.  Now, go to www.feedburner.com.  You should be already logged into your Google account that you use for Blogger.  When you get to the homepage, just click on the name of your feed.  This will take you to a page that looks like this:

Under Feed Stats on the left hand column, click on Subscribers.

Step 2:

Then under Email Subscription Services you will see a link called Feedburner Email Subscriptions.  Click this and a link will appear underneath that says Manage Your Email Subscriber List.  Click that link.

Step 3:
Now you will see a list of all of your email subscribers.  Before I export the subscribers, I personally went through and deleted all Unverified subscribers.  This means that they did not complete the Feedburner optin when signing up for emails.  I’m not positive if inactive subscribers can be imported into Mailchimp but just to be on the safe side so that people who do not want emails did not get them, I deleted the inactive subscribers.

To do this, just click on the X next to Unverified subscribers.  Down at the bottom of the list hit the Save button when you are done.

Step 4:

Now, you just want to export the list of subscriber email addresses.  So right above your list, click on Export: CSV.  Dependent on how your computer is set up, this will automatically download the list to your computer.  Save this file.

Step 5:

Now, since we do not want duplicate emails going out since you will be sending out posts via email in Mailchimp, simply scroll down to the bottom of your email list (on the same page as above) and click the Deactivate button.  This will not delete your email subscribers but just deactivate the subscription service.

Step 6:
Now log into your Mailchimp account.

In the menu at the top, click on Lists.  This will bring you to the list that you have created (remember if you have not set up a campaign or list yet in Mailchimp, you can follow my tutorial here.  Then click on the arrow next to the Stats dropdown.  In the dropdown menu, click on Import.

Step 7:

When choosing where to import contacts, pick CSV or tab-delimited text file.  Then click the blue Next button in the bottom right corner.

Step 8:
Now, just click on the Browse button to upload the CSV file that you downloaded in Step 4 and upload it.

Step 9:

Now, you might get a column like this one, this just means that the form fields on your .csv file do not match the form fields from Mailchimp.  You can just skip these as they are for internal use only.

Step 10:

Now just click the blue Import button in the lower right hand corner of the screen.  And that’s it!  Your Feedburner subscribers will be imported into Mailchimp and you can start sending posts by email through Mailchimp.  Every Mailchimp email has an unsubscribe button in the footer so subscribers can always unsubscribe easily.  And with Mailchimp, you can send out newsletters and other communication outside of just blog posts, which you can’t do with just Feedburner so you have a lot more flexibility.  Have fun, and email responsibly, no one likes a spammer!