View or Export Your Contacts

After you've collected your desired contacts in Mailchimp, you may want to export them into a CSV file. You can export an entire audience, a segment, a tag, or a group. Exports can include subscribed, non-subscribed, unsubscribed, and cleaned contacts.

In this article, you'll learn how to view and export your contacts, and access the export history for each audience.

Before you start

Here are some things to know before you begin this process.

• The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a European Union (EU) privacy law that gives EU citizens the right to ask how their personal data is stored and used. If a contact requests their personal data from you, you’ll need to export directly from their contact profile instead of using the processes described in this article.
• Some exports must be performed by certain user levels. For example, only Owners and Admins can export audiences. Check out Manage User Levels in Your Account to learn more.
• Contact exports don't include email report data, like open and click rates. To download email report data, export an email report.
• Your export may include a ZIP file that contains separate CSV files for each type of email contact (subscribed, unsubscribed, non-subscribed, and cleaned). Unarchive the ZIP file to access the CSV files and open them in your preferred spreadsheet application.
• Contact exports and their CSVs are available in your account for 30 days.

Configure contact table

The contact table provides basic information about the contacts in your audience. Reorder columns or turn them on or off to configure your preferred view. When you hide a column, it doesn't delete the corresponding audience field or hide the field on your signup form.

To configure the columns on the contact table, follow these steps.

1. Click Audience.
2. If you have more than 1 audience, click the Audience drop-down and choose the one you want to work with.
3. Click Columns.
4. Uncheck the boxes next to the fields you want to hide or check the boxes next to the fields you want to view.
   
5. To reorder columns, click and drag the three vertical dots next to any name field and drag it to your preferred location.
6. Click Apply.

View or export an audience

To view or export your entire audience, follow these steps.

1. Click Audience.
2. If you have more than 1 audience, click the Audience drop-down and choose the one you want to work with.
3. Click Export audience.
4. In the Export all contacts? pop-up, click Export CSV. You'll receive a message that your export is in progress and to expect an email when it’s complete.

View or export a segment

To view or export a saved segment, follow these steps.

1. Click Audience.
2. If you have more than 1 audience, click the Audience drop-down and choose the one you want to work with.
3. Click the Segments drop-down, and choose the segment you want to export.
4. Click Export segment.
5. In the Export segment? pop-up, click Export CSV. You’ll receive a message that your export is in progress and to expect an email when it’s complete.

View or export tagged contacts

To view or export tagged contacts, follow these steps.

1. Click Audience.
2. If you have more than 1 audience, click the Audience drop-down and choose the one you want to work with.
3. Click the Tags drop-down and choose the tag you want to work with.
4. Click Save as segment.
5. In the Export segment preview? pop-up, click Export CSV. You’ll receive a message that your export is in progress and to expect an email when it’s complete.

View or export a group

You also have the option to view a group, or export it. To view or export a group of subscribers, follow these steps.

1. Click Audience.
2. If you have more than 1 audience, click the Audience drop-down and choose the one you want to work with.
3. Click the More options drop-down and choose Groups.
4. Click View Group to expand the group you want to view.
5. Click the # contacts link to view the individual contacts in each group.
6. Click Export segment.
7. In the Export segment preview? pop-up, click Export CSV. You’ll receive a message that your export is in progress and to expect an email when it’s complete.

Open your export file

Your export may include a ZIP file that contains separate CSV files for each type of contact (subscribed, unsubscribed, non-subscribed, and cleaned). Unarchive the ZIP file to access the CSV files and open each file individually in your preferred spreadsheet application. An export containing a single contact type—for example, an export of archived contacts—will contain only one CSV file.

How you open a CSV file depends on the spreadsheet program you use. You can open the file with any spreadsheet program, but we find most people use Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, or OpenOffice Calc.

Here are some links to show you how to open files in these programs.

Open a CSV file with Excel
Open a CSV file with Google Sheets
Open a CSV file with OpenOffice Calc

About your export file

Export files contain your audience fields along with contact data that Mailchimp collects. If you have GDPR-friendly forms enabled for your audience, the CSV file header will match the GDPR form field label in your segments.

What's included

• Audience fields (excluding the language field)
• Marketing permissions
  If your audience is GDPR-enabled, this column will show each marketing permission a contact has opted in to from your signup form.
• MEMBER_RATING
  The contact's member activity rating.
• OPTIN_TIME
  The time a contact accessed your signup form. The timestamp will only show for contacts who have completed the single opt-in process.
• OPTIN_IP
  The IP address used when the contact accessed the hosted signup form. This won't show for contacts who haven’t completed the double opt-in process.
• CONFIRM_TIME
  The date and time the contact clicked the link in the opt-in confirmation email.
• CONFIRM_IP
  The IP address used when the contact joined your audience.
• LATITUDE
  Latitude for the IP address of the CONFIRM_IP.
• LONGITUDE
  Longitude for the IP address of the CONFIRM_IP.
• GMTOFF and DSTOFF
  Our system is based on UTC time. GMTOFF indicates the adjustment made to the time based on geolocation data, and DSTOFF takes daylight saving time into account. These are used to determine TIMEZONE.
• TIMEZONE, CC and REGION
  Based on the contact’s geolocation data. This data will only show when geolocation information has been captured.
• LAST_CHANGED
  The date and time when information in the contact's profile was last changed or updated.
• LEID and EUID
  LEID is the unique identifier for a contact, specific to an audience. EUID is the unique identifier for a contact on the account level, across all audiences.
• NOTES
  Notes added within the contact profile page.
• TAGS

If you have SMS contacts in your audience, a separate SMS folder will be included in your export file with the following data.

• Source
  The signup platform through which an SMS contact originally opted in to your SMS marketing (landing page, signup form, contact import, etc.).
• SMS Acquisition Time
  The time an SMS contact first opted in to your SMS marketing.
• Revocation of Consent Time
  If applicable, the time an SMS contact opted out of your SMS marketing
• Subscription Status
  The state of your SMS contact in relation to your SMS Marketing program at the time of export (subscribed, unsubscribed, non-subscribed). The subscription status determines whether or not you can send SMS marketing messages to a contact.
• Program Name
  The name of the SMS Marketing program the SMS contact is subscribed to. This is the title you assigned to your SMS Marketing program on your application.
• SMS Phone Number
  The mobile number for which consent to receive SMS marketing was granted.

What's not included

Here are some examples of data that is not included in your audience export. For GDPR compliance purposes, some of this data can be exported from an individual contact’s profile.

• Email signup source
• Email engagement metrics, like opens and clicks
• Purchase history
• Language
• Predicted demographics
• Favorite email client
• Social profile data
• A complete record of contact profile updates

View contact export history

To view or download a contact export from the past 30 days, follow these steps.

1. Click Audience.
2. If you have more than 1 audience, click the Audience drop-down and choose the one you want to work with.
3. Click the More options drop-down and choose Export history.

Each entry on the Exports page shows the segment name or email address, the export date and time, who made the export, and how many contacts were exported on that date. Click Download to download a copy of any export.

Troubleshoot a contact export

My export includes strange or unexpected characters.

If your data contains special characters, your export may not display correctly in Excel. To see special characters in Excel, use one of these workarounds.

• Change the file extension from .csv to .txt, then open the file in Excel. When Excel prompts for the file type and character encoding, set encoding to UTF-8.
• Open the CSV file in a text editor, and make sure the text editor's settings are set to UTF-8 encoding. Copy all the content from the text editor and paste it into a blank Excel sheet. Then use the Text-To-Columns function in Excel to split everything into columns.

My address field just says "US."

When physical addresses are imported incorrectly, our import tool inserts “US” as the default value. You’ll need to reformat and re-import your original file in order for Mailchimp to read, store, and export the address data correctly. To learn more about formatting physical address data in Mailchimp, check out our format guidelines. After your file is corrected, perform an auto-update import to fix the address fields.

I’m looking for the marketing status of my contacts.

Most contact exports contain separate files for each contact type (or marketing status). The contact type appears in the file name of the exported file.

I’m looking for my archived contacts.

Archived contacts are exported separately from your active contacts. To learn more about viewing and exporting archived contacts, check out Archive or Unarchive Your Contacts.