Importing Subscribers

Video by the ConvertKit Team

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Let's get started with talking about how to import subscribers into convert kit. If you're coming from another platform, you may have some existing subscribers to import. If that's the case for you. The first thing you'll want to do is create a tag within convert kit to import them into you can scroll down on the subscribers page and then click create a tag from the sidebar.
Give it a name and then press save. Next click the red add subscribers button. And then after that you have the option to add a single subscriber import a CSV file, or we actually have some built in importers that you can use. If you're switching from certain other services, if the subscribers you're importing only have fields for first name and email address, you should be able to import them via CSV or using one of our built in importers right away.
But if you're importing subscribers that have custom fields, which would be any fields other than first name and email address, you'll want to use the CSV method. And there are a couple of steps to follow before you import your file, which I'll go over now, first off you need to create the field within ConvertKit.
If you don't have any subscribers yet, go ahead and just add yourself as a subscriber using the, add a single subscriber option, then click into your subscriber profile from the subscriber list and create a new field from the sidebar. You can also add a value for the subscriber or just leave it blank for now, the only required field for any subscriber in your account is email address.
Once this field is created on one subscriber, it will be available for all of them once they're imported. So we can actually just let the CSV importer do the rest of the work. Now you just have to make sure that this field exists in your account first in order for the values to be able to be imported into it.
Now we can go back to the add subscribers button, import a CSV, select what we're importing them into upload your CSV file. And then the last step is to make sure that you map the fields correctly. If you have any issues with this process, there might be an issue with your CSV file itself. We actually have a dedicated article in our knowledge base on troubleshooting common CSV import issues that may help resolve that, but just in general rules to follow or that each column in your CSV should be a certain field.
So in this example, I have a column for first name, last name and email address. And like I mentioned earlier, blank fields are okay to have the only required field for a subscriber to be imported is email address. Then go ahead and click import subscribers. It might take a bit of time to process, but they should show up in your account before long.