Constant Contact

Welcome to Buttondown! After you've read through our "Getting Started" guide, we're here to help you with your next step: transferring your subscribers from your old email platform to Buttondown.

Exporting your subscribers

Export your Constant Contact contacts by following the instructions in Constant Contact's documentation.

Constant Contact will prompt you to select any fields you want to export. When you import your data into Buttondown, you’ll be able to include notes, date created, and tags. Anything else you want to include can be added as custom metadata.

Importing your subscribers to Buttondown

Navigate to the “Subscribers" tab of your Buttondown dashboard to complete the import process.

To learn more, read Importing your subscribers.

Importing your archives (campaigns)

According to Constant Contact (as of November 2021):

There isn't a way to export the campaigns. The one way is to download the email campaigns as an image or PDF.

You can save or print your email campaigns as PDFs by following the instructions in Constant Contact's documentation. Email us and we’ll help you with importing your archives.

You did it!

After you complete the procedures above, Buttondown begins an audit and migration process to make sure everything is in order. After that completes, you should be safe to disable or deactivate your Constant Contact account.

I have multiple lists in Constant Contact. Can I have multiple lists in Buttondown, too?

Yes! There are two ways to group subscribers in Buttondown:

• If you want to be able to completely separate out multiple verticals of a newsletter (and, optionally, keep track of different archives) or have two entirely different publications with separate subscriber bases, you can set them up as separate newsletters entirely. Then you can follow the import instructions above for each one.
• If you want all your subscribers in one place, but you want to be able to send some messages to certain groups of subscribers, use tags and metadata.

To add list names from Constant Contact as tags to your Constant Contact data before you import to Buttondown:

1. Export your Constant Contact subscribers by following the instructions in Constant Contact's documentation.
2. Choose the lists you want to export, then chose Export from the Actions menu.
3. Choose the fields you want to export. Make sure to include “Lists.” When you import into Buttondown, you’ll be able to include notes, date created, and tags, plus anything else you want to save as custom metadata.

If you don’t use tags in Constant Contact, you can just import the email lists as tags. If you also have tags from Constant Contact that you want to import, you can open the CSV file in a spreadsheet editor, create a new column, and use a formula such as =concat(E2,",",D2) to add the list name(s) to the tags, then save it as a CSV file.

1. Save the spreadsheet as a CSV file.
2. Follow the steps in Importing your subscribers.

By the way

With Buttondown, it's easy to export your subscribers, surveys, emails, and other data whenever you wish—no strings attached!