Import contacts — bring your existing audience in without losing them

If you're moving to Linkstacked from somewhere else, you almost certainly already have a list of contacts — subscribers, customers, attendees, members — somewhere. The worst thing you could do is start from zero just because you switched tools.

Importing brings everyone over in one move: emails, names, tags, segments, opt-in dates, source attribution. The same audience that's been getting your emails on the old tool starts getting them on Linkstacked-driven campaigns the next day, with no welcome-back-from-the-grave email needed.

What we can import from

• Mailchimp — connect, pick a list, we sync all subscribers with their tags, merge fields, and opt-in dates
• ConvertKit / Kit — same as above, plus your forms and sequences are imported into separate segments
• Beehiiv — full subscriber import with custom fields and source attribution
• Substack — paid + free subscriber lists, billing status preserved
• Ghost — labels and subscription tier preserved
• Mailerlite — groups become tags
• Klaviyo — lists and profile properties imported
• CSV — drag-drop any spreadsheet with at minimum an email column; we infer the rest
• Direct API — for tools we don't have native integration with, post to our subscriber API

What we do with duplicates

If the same email appears in multiple sources you're importing from, we merge them — the resulting Linkstacked subscriber has the union of tags and metadata from all sources, with the earliest opt-in date preserved (most generous treatment of the visitor's consent). Conflicting fields are resolved by recency — most-recent value wins.

Compliance handling

Imported subscribers come with the same compliance metadata they had in the source: opt-in date, opt-in source, IP at consent (if available), the wording of the consent line. We do not generate fake consent data — if the source tool didn't capture consent properly, we mark those subscribers as 'consent unknown' so you can decide whether to re-confirm.

If your old tool was sloppy about consent and you're operating under GDPR, the conservative play is to send a re-confirmation email to the 'unknown' segment. We'll generate the email template and the unsubscribe-friendly copy. The cost is a smaller list (people don't re-confirm at high rates) but the benefit is sleeping at night.

What survives the import

Beyond the basics (email, name, opt-in date), we preserve:

1. 1Tags — your existing segmentation comes over as Linkstacked tags. You can immediately filter and target by tag.
2. 2Custom fields — first name, last name, location, anything you had as a merge field becomes a custom field on the Linkstacked subscriber.
3. 3Engagement signal — if the source tool has 'last opened' or 'last clicked' data, we import it. Useful for excluding stale subscribers from your first Linkstacked campaign.
4. 4Subscription tier or paid status — Substack and Ghost paid subscribers are flagged so you don't accidentally send them the free-only newsletter.

What we ignore

We don't import bounced or unsubscribed contacts. We don't import subscribers flagged as spam complaints. We don't import contacts older than 24 months who have zero engagement signal — sending to those is a deliverability landmine. If you really want them, you can override the filter, but you've been warned.

Plan and limits

Import is available on the Build plan and above. Lower plans can do CSV imports of up to 1,000 contacts as a one-time migration. The reason Build gates the high-volume imports is that the dedupe-and-merge pipeline runs in batches and consumes real compute — we charge for it via plan tier rather than per-row.

Migrate this week

If you've been thinking about switching for months but the import step is what's stopping you — book a 20-minute migration call with our team. We've moved lists of 500,000+ subscribers without breaking deliverability. The hard cases are interesting; the easy cases are over in 10 minutes.