Switching email provider is five jobs, and the subscriber list is only one of them. The subscriber list has to travel with its consent records, the sign-up forms on the website have to point somewhere new, the templates need rebuilding, the automated emails need recreating, and the domain the messages leave from has to be set up again.
Most owners who outgrow a free plan start by comparing the two names they’ve heard most often, and a klaviyo vs mailchimp comparison answers the question most of them ask first: what each one costs per month at list sizes from 500 to 50,000 contacts. Whichever platform the owner picks, the moving work is the same, and doing it in the right order keeps customers from noticing the switch at all.
Moving your subscribers, and proof they agreed
The export takes minutes: the old account’s contacts page produces a CSV file, one row per subscriber.
What needs care is the set of columns beside each email address, and consent matters most. For each subscriber, the record should show when they signed up, on which form, and what they were told they’d receive. If you rely on consent under UK GDPR, you have to be able to prove it when a customer or the ICO asks, and an export with no sign-up dates can’t do that. Unsubscribed and bounced contacts have to move too, as a suppression list. A gift shop owner who imports only the active subscribers and sends the first newsletter from the new account gets a reply from a customer who unsubscribed last spring asking why the emails have started again. Import those addresses first, marked as unsubscribed, so the new platform blocks them from the very first send.
People who unsubscribed and then start receiving emails again hit the spam button, and inbox providers keep a count of every report. Google’s email sender guidelines for Gmail ask every sender to keep the spam rate shown in Postmaster Tools below 0.3%. If 2,000 of your subscribers use Gmail, six spam reports on a single day’s send already reach that line.
Forms and templates to rebuild
Every sign-up form on the website carries a small piece of code that sends new addresses to the old account. The pop-up on the homepage, the box in the footer and the tick box at checkout all keep feeding it until someone swaps that code, so list every page where a form appears before switching anything off.
Templates rarely import cleanly, because each platform builds them in its own editor. Rebuild the header, product blocks and footer by hand, with contact details and a working unsubscribe link in place.
Copying the automated emails before the old ones stop
Automated emails are the easiest thing to overlook, since they run without anyone pressing send.
The welcome email a new subscriber gets, the reminder after an abandoned basket and the thank-you after a first order each run on a trigger and a delay that someone set up once. Before closing anything, open each automation in the old account and note its trigger, its timing and its exact wording, including any discount code it hands out. When a code has already expired but still appears in the new welcome email, customers try it at the till or email to ask why it doesn’t work. Send every new automation to your own address and read it on a phone, then switch the original off on the same day its copy goes live. Doing it on the same day stops new subscribers getting two welcome emails, or none at all.
Setting up the sending domain and choosing a date
A new platform sends from the shop’s own domain only after the owner proves the domain is theirs. The proof is a handful of DNS records, added at the company where the domain was registered, which let inbox providers check that an email carrying the shop’s name really left from an approved service. Gmail asks anyone sending more than 5,000 messages a day to its users to set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC together, and a list holding more than 5,000 Gmail addresses crosses that threshold with one campaign.
The DMARC record states what the domain owner wants inbox providers to do with mail that fails authentication, and the DMARC specification published by the IETF defines three policies: none, quarantine and reject. If the shop’s web developer set the policy to reject, inbox providers are asked to refuse every email from the new platform that passes neither DKIM nor SPF on the shop’s own domain, so involve whoever holds the DNS login from the first day.
Pick the switch date together with whoever looks after the website, away from any planned sale, and keep the old account open for a month afterwards, on its cheapest plan or on the free plan if the list is small enough to fit, so the exports and past campaign reports stay within reach.
