I Already Had a Mailchimp Audience. How Do I Avoid Paying for Two?

When you add the integration, ISP creates a new audience called Integrated Solutions: Political. If you already had an audience in Mailchimp, your account now has two, and Mailchimp bills you for the contacts in both.

To get back to paying for one audience without losing any data:

1. Export your existing audience from Mailchimp before you change anything, so you have a backup file.
2. Import those contacts into ISP. From now on, your ISP database is where you add and update contacts. The integration pushes them to the Integrated Solutions: Political audience.
3. Check the Integrated Solutions: Political audience in Mailchimp to confirm that your contacts have synced.
4. Archive the contacts in your old audience. Don’t delete them. Archived contacts:
   – don’t count toward your Mailchimp billing
   – keep all their data and past activity, which you can still see in your reports
   – can be exported or unarchived later if you need them

   To archive, switch to your old audience in Mailchimp (not Integrated Solutions: Political), then go to Audience ? Manage audience ? the three-dots (?) menu ? Archive contacts. To archive everyone at once, check the box at the top of the list, then click Select all [number] contacts above the column headings. Large audiences can take several minutes to finish.

5. Rebuild any automations on the Integrated Solutions: Political audience. Automations built on your old audience will not follow your contacts to the new one.

What happens to my contacts’ email history?

Opens, clicks, and other campaign activity stay with the audience where they happened. When your contacts sync into Integrated Solutions: Political, they start with no history. If you archive your old audience (see above), that history is kept and you can still see it there, but it won’t appear in the new audience.

Moving engagement history between audiences can only be done by Mailchimp. ISP support can’t do it for you. If you want the history carried over, contact Mailchimp support and ask:

“My account has two audiences with the same contacts: [your old audience name] and Integrated Solutions: Political, which is created and synced by my ISP integration. I need to keep Integrated Solutions: Political as my only active audience. Can you transfer each contact’s engagement history (opens, clicks, and campaign activity) from [your old audience name] to Integrated Solutions: Political? If that isn’t possible, can I export my old audience with its engagement history included?”

If Mailchimp support offers to merge the audiences, make sure Integrated Solutions: Political is the one that remains, with its name unchanged. If it’s merged away or renamed, the integration will stop working. If the first support agent can’t help, ask to be escalated to the next level of support.