Your CRM is the beating heart of your business, so it’s good sense to shop around when there are so many good choices out there. You need a CRM that continues to meet your needs even as your business evolves and changes, and SimplyCast is proud to offer a scalable solution for your consideration.
Tried a few CRMs already? If so, it’s simple to import your existing clients!
To show you how, we’ll use MailChimp as an example. They’re huge in the field of email marketing, and it’s likely that even if you haven’t used their services, you’ll recognize their name.
Exporting Your Audience from MailChimp
Starting from MailChimp, check out the main menu on the left side of the screen. You’ll see an “Audience” option that opens a dropdown menu once you click it. In this dropdown, you’re looking for “All contacts;” this will take you to your Contacts screen.
The “Contacts” Screen
Open the “Manage Audience” tab. You’ll see all your contacts listed with their respective information like their name, email address, street address and phone number. To compile them into a handy spreadsheet, just click the “Export Audience” option on the right side of the table.
Here’s a handy tip: if you don’t want to keep your whole database of contacts, you can check the boxes to export certain contacts instead. Alternatively, leave the boxes unchecked to export them all as one file.
A pop-up will ask you to confirm your decision. Click “Confirm export,” and you’ll receive an email shortly after to let you know your export is complete.
Just open the email and click the “Download List Data” button inside to receive your ZIP file with all your contacts inside.
Uploading Your Contacts into SimplyCast’s CRM
Once you’ve got your ZIP file of contacts, unzip it with a program like 7-Zip or WinRAR.
Our CRM gives you the option to start a new list or upload an existing one. Click the bright green “Upload List” button. This will open a popup where you can upload a list from a file, from text, or via our Integrations Manager. You want the top option: “Upload from file.” Select it and click the blue OK button.
Choose Your File
When uploading a contact list to SimplyCast’s CRM, it can have a maximum of 250 columns.
Click the blue “Choose File” button and find the file you just exported. It should be in the format of an Excel spreadsheet. Click on it, then “Open,” and the file name will appear in the white bar on the Choose Your File page.
Once you’ve clicked the checkbox to agree to the terms, you can click “Next” at the bottom right of the screen and proceed to the next step.
Field Mapping
The Field Mapping screen gives you loads of customization options for your contact list:
- Change the names of each field via handy dropdown menus.
- Designate your primary column with a click.
- Either merge duplicate contact entries or create a new entry for each.
- Hide “Ignored” columns or display them.
- Automatically perform a Geocoding search to assign coordinates to each contact’s Location field.
Your CRM, your way. Our platform is fully scalable to be as simple or as complex as you need.
Got your fields mapped the way you want them? Click Next again to go to the final step.
List Selection
List Selection lets you choose what to do with your imported contacts:
- Create a new list for the contacts you’re migrating over from MailChimp.
- Give your list a name.
- Add your imported contacts to a list that already exists.
- Click the checkbox labelled, “Set mapped columns as visible” to toggle visibility settings for columns in your list.
Click “Complete” at the bottom right of your screen, and your upload will begin. You will receive a notification when it’s done.
And there you have it! All your contacts in one place, with little to no interruption to your email marketing campaigns.
Tags or Lists?
Here’s where users of MailChimp will probably notice a slight terminology difference:
When organizing your contacts for internal use on MailChimp, you would use “tags.” This differs a bit on SimplyCast, as we use “lists” for this.
Also worth noting is that on the SimplyCast platform, “tags” describe additional pieces of data you can add to contacts across lists.
This isn’t the only example of different wordings, so we’ve added a couple more here as a heads up:
- “Campaigns” and “Use Cases” are SimplyCast’s equivalent to MailChimp’s “Journeys.”
- Enjoy MailChimp’s “Segment” functionality? You can still display information about your recipients in a similar way by creating a list of contacts using field information.
Want to Keep Your Email Templates?
SimplyCast has you covered!
Just download your image assets from Mailchimp’s Content Manager and upload them into SimplyCast’s File Manager.
Both Mailchimp and SimplyCast use HTML, so you can easily keep your campaign designs consistent.
To transfer your saved templates:
Export HTML from Mailchimp
- From the Content section of your Mailchimp account, go to the Email templates page.
- Search for the template you want to export.
- Click the arrow to the right of the Edit button to open a dropdown.
- Select the option, “Export as HTML”.
- Click the “Export Template” button to download your template as an HTML file.
Import HTML to SimplyCast
- Sign into SimplyCast and select “Email” from the “Applications” tab.
- From the Email Dashboard, click “Create Campaign”.
- Use the pop-up window to name your campaign and click the green “Create” button.
- To input your HTML code, drag and drop a Text Block element onto your email. Click the “<>Source” button in the top panel. This will open a pop-up where you can paste your HTML.
- Make sure everything’s looking good by clicking the blue “Preview and Send” option in the “Actions” tab on the right.
If you used Mailchimp’s Automatic CSS Inliner to generate CSS for your email marketing campaigns, you can easily import that code into your SimplyCast template, too!
To Add CSS to Your SimplyCast Campaign
- Open the campaign you created in the previous section.
- Look to the right of your screen and find our handy “Actions” menu.
- Click the “Custom Styles (CSS) option to open the “Project Styles” drawer.
- Paste your CSS code into the “CSS” box and click “Save”.
And there you have it! Your email marketing campaigns are back up and ready to go.
Still Have Questions?
That’s totally natural. Even with the help of hyperautomation, changing to a new service can be a little confusing at times, especially if you’re used to your previous one.
Why not reach out to our experts today and let them show you how it works? Even if you’re not sure SimplyCast is right for you, you can book a free demo and see it for yourself.
