Hi @LukasK1!

Welcome to the community. This is an interesting question, and the good news is there’s a simple solution. 

Since you’re migrating an existing list, where double opt-in has already been given, my recommendation would be to drop that consideration as part of your migration process. It’s not necessary for you to import your list into Klaviyo now!

My agency generally recommends our clients disable the double optin setting for their list in Klaviyo, since we want to make it as easy as possible for people to join the email list. If you’re concerned about bots or spam trap emails, a consistent list cleaning process is a great way to maintain overall list health and ensure that low quality emails are removed. 

So I’d revise that list setting before you import the CSV, then import the file into your list with the existing email consent field you’ve already prepped. Also - if you haven’t already prepped the CSV file with the $consent field specifying s“EMAIL”] - you can skip that step, especially if you already have a prior “optin timestamp” field exported from your previous ESP. When importing the CSV into your Klaviyo list, there will be a step that asks if your list has given consent to marketing emails, and by selecting yes, you automatically populate the Klaviyo field $consent for all emails/ profiles. 

One more thing - if you already have a Welcome Series flow, you’ll want to make sure these people don’t get entered into the queue for that when you import them into your master list. A quick way to do this is to create a Text data type custom property on a test profile named something like list_merging or list_cleaning with a value of yes or no/ blank. Then you can create a flow filter that says “if nproperty name] is not set” which will remove anyone who has list_merging = yes from the flow queue!

I hope this helps.

Gabrielle

Klaviyo Champion & Marketing Lead at ebusiness pros

Thanks Gabrielle, 

so you’re basically confirming that the “normal” way to do this is to use a workaround. I find that fairly hard to believe that the usual way to import already opted-in users into Klaviyo is to use a workaround. I usually see a big advantage to using features (not only in CRM tools but every tool I’ve implemented so far) the way they were meant to and keep workarounds to a absolute minimum. 

Still don’t understand the difference between consent and opted-in. In Braze, which is the tool we are migrating from, there is only one option, which is the optin status (opted-in, subscribed, unsubscribed).

I saw that @David To from the Klaviyo team liked the first answer. David, is this really the recommended way to migrate users? Clearly asking users for their opt-in again is also not a workable solution for obvious reasons.

Best,

Lukas

Hi Lukas,

I agree with you about keeping workarounds to a minimum. Since Braze and Klaviyo don’t have a supported integration where you could sync your lists automatically, your best option is to migrate your profiles via CSV upload, as you’ve already started doing.

To help clarify the different aspects of your CSV prep for you… In the case of being able to send someone an email, the $consent field is the backend data point that tracks someone’s optin status. So it’s like two sides to the same coin.

IF someone is unsuppressed, THEN they’re opted-in AND subscribed - it’s basically just one status in Klaviyo. I say this with the assumption that you have one master list to store all your emails. The exception would be if you have multiple lists in Klaviyo that require distinct optin, but I would not recommend this unless you have a scenario like one of my clients where they have a Master list of consumers as their default customer-base, then a secondary list for Dealers of their products.

IF they’re suppressed, THEN they’ve unsubscribed OR their email bounced too many times and Klaviyo suppressed the profile automatically to protect the integrity of your sender reputation. Anyone in the existing CSV you’re trying to migrate with a prior tracked status of “unsubscribed” should be removed from the CSV that you’re importing if you want to check the Klaviyo import box that says “all of these people have consented to receive emails” - that will automatically mark each of those profiles as unsuppressed and opted-in subscribers. If you want to preserve the data of your list for analysis, then you could upload a separate CSV of any unsubscribed email into the “suppressed profiles” section of Klaviyo. Suppressed profiles have no impact on your billing, since you’re not sending them emails. 

The only instance where you would need the workaround I describe is IF you already have a Welcome Series flow that’s live and sending emails, based on the trigger of someone subscribing to your master list. If you don’t have that running yet, then just import your CSV as-is.

Side note for later: That concept of a list_merging or list_cleaning property will still be applicable for any following bulk import to your master list. For example, if you do a giveaway and have a CSV of new emails to import into the list - they shouldn’t get your default Welcome Series. Instead, they should be sent a specific Welcome Series flow that reminds them of how they found your brand and the giveaway they entered.

My perspective is that the double-optin status isn’t high priority information to maintain as part of this migration. It’s primarily a list cleaning tool, which helped you confirm the quality of each optin when you built that initial list. 

If you want to simplify your migration, then disable the double optin setting on your list while you import the CSV of migrated profiles into your master list. Once you’ve imported the initial CSV, then you could turn the double optin setting back on, if you still feel strongly about using it going forward.

Hopefully this helps you better understand how all the pieces work together!

Warmly,
Gabrielle

Thanks Gabrielle, these are very good insights!