The Best way to Combine Lists in MailChimp

In MailChimp you may create as many lists as you’d like. It’s best, for many reasons, to use only one list. I’ve discussed these reasons for a single list in the past and cover the topic in my MailChimp classes.

How to combine MailChimp lists

If you already use multiple lists in MailChimp and want to combine your lists (in order to use a single list) the are two means of moving from multiple to a single list:

• Use the MailChimp list combine tool or
• Export your lists, combine them in Microsoft Excel or CSV filetype then import back into a list.

There are advantages and disadvantage to both means of combining lists and I’ve always preferred combining in Excel or CSV as it gives more control of subscriber data.

Tag your lists when combining

A question I often get asked is how, when the lists have been merged, may it be determined which list or lists the subscriber was originally on.

In the past this could be achieved by creating a new column in the combined spreadsheet and entering the previous list names in the new column. A segment could then be created to identify which subscribers were on which list or lists.

MailChimp have recently released Tags. It is now simpler than ever, when combining lists, to merely create a tag to identify the ‘old’ list names and add the tags relevant to each subscriber for each of the ‘old’ lists.