How to Move Jetpack Subscribers to MailChimp?

Jetpack is one of the most popular plugins for WordPress content management system. It offers many modules to enhance the distribution of your content. Jetpack Subscription is one of such module allow users subscribing to new blog posts and comments on your site. This distributes the blog post immediately after publishing to individual inbox of the email subscribers. When your site is growing in size Subscription module is not sufficient to handle email campaigns. You will need more dedicated email marketing solutions like MailChimp. In such case, you need to move all existing subscribers to new platform. In this article let us discuss on how to move Jetpack subscribers to MailChimp platform.

Finding Blog Subscribers in Jetpack

First step in the migration process is to download all your existing subscribers from Jetpack plugin. Login to your WordPress site and navigate to “Jetpack > Site Stats” section. Scroll down to end of the page to view the subscribed followers status of your site. You will see two counts under “Followers”.

• Number of people subscribed to your blog posts
• Number of people subscribed to receive comment updates.

Unfortunately, you can neither see nor download the email ids of the people subscribed to comments. You can only download the email ids of the people who subscribed to receive blog posts. In the above screenshot, it is 345 showing against “Blog” link. The 180 subscribers showing against “Comments” can’t be downloaded from Jetpack plugin.

Downloading Jetpack Subscribers

Click on the “Blog” link to see the list of all email ids subscribed to your blog. Again you will see two options:

• WordPress.com followers – people following you on WordPress.com. You will not be able to see or download the email ids of WordPress.com followers.
• Email-only followers – this is the list you can download.

Scroll down to end of the page and you will see an option like “Download all email-only followers as CSV”.

Click on the link and the subscribers list will be automatically downloaded to your computer. If you are not connected to WordPress.com then you will be prompted to login before the download starts. Note that the list will contain all active subscribers to your blog. Users not activated the subscription and unsubscribed from the distribution will not be part of the downloaded file.

Uploading Subscribers List to MailChimp

Now that you have the list of active subscribers to your blog and the next step is to upload the list to MailChimp list. Login to your MailChimp account and click on your list under “List” tab. Go to “Import subscribers” option available under “Add subscribers” tab.

Choose CSV file upload option and click on “Next”.

Upload the subscriber list file from Jetpack to MailChimp.

You need to agree for the billing plan upgrade as MailChimp charges based on the number of subscribers. If the upload increase your subscribers list then the your MailChimp account will automatically get upgraded accordingly. The next screen will give you some options on the import like categorizing the new subscribers. MailChimp will automatically remove the duplicate entries by comparing your existing subscribers and sync new subscribers to your existing database.

The importing may take some time based on size of the file and your import settings.

Once the import is completed all Jetpack subscribers will be uploaded into your existing MailChimp list. You can create a campaign and send emails to those subscribers.

Disabling Jetpack Subscription Module

The final step is to disable Jetpack Subscription module and remove the signup forms after migrating to MailChimp. If required, you can also only disable blog post subscription and continue to use comment subscription. In such case new users can’t subscribe with Jetpack but those subscribed previously will continue to receive the blog update emails.