Migrate from another platform

Moving off another email tool is mostly data transfer: your audience, the fields attached to them, your designs, and your automations. There are two ways to do it.

The fast way: an AI agent

Connect an AI agent over MCP and tell it to migrate the account. It has tools to import contacts, create custom fields with a backfill, bring templates across as raw MJML, and rebuild sequences. This is how we moved Aid Registry across in a day. See what an agent can do.

The rest of this guide is the manual path.

1. Export from your current tool

Export contacts as CSV, including every custom field and the date each person subscribed. Separately, export the list of people who have unsubscribed or hard bounced.

2. Import contacts

Use Contacts, Import. Map each column, creating custom fields as you go. See importing contacts.

3. Bring your opt-outs across

Import the unsubscribed and bounced list as a second file, with a status of unsubscribed. They stay in your audience so you never email them again, but they count as suppressed from day one. See unsubscribes and suppression.

4. Recreate templates

For pixel-identical designs, paste your existing HTML or MJML into a template as raw code. To make them editable, rebuild the important ones as blocks. See build a template.

5. Rebuild automations

For each automation in your old tool, build a sequence with the same trigger event and steps. Point your backend at /api/v1/events so the same signups that drove the old flows drive these.

6. Verify and cut over

Verify your sending domain, send yourself tests from a few templates, activate the sequences, and send a small campaign to a test segment before you point production traffic at Pombo.

What you have now

Your audience, fields, designs, and automations running in Pombo, with your suppression list intact.