How to Export Your Contacts, and the Parts the Export Button Leaves Behind

Where the Export button lives in the tools you probably use

Open the contacts or customers list in the tool, look for Export (sometimes behind a three-dot menu or a "More" button), and choose CSV. That file opens in any spreadsheet, and almost every other business tool can import it.

If you only want your phone contacts on a new phone, pick vCard (.vcf) instead. vCard is the format phones and email apps use to swap address books. CSV is what business software expects.

Here is where the button sits in the tools small businesses use most. Menus get moved, so if yours looks different, search the tool's help center for "export contacts."

That last caveat about user roles is more important than it looks. It gets its own section below.

The contact file is the address book, not the relationship

Most people expect the export to contain everything they see when they click on a client. It doesn't. A standard contact export gives you one row per person: name, email, phone, address, tags, and usually your custom fields. That's the address book.

What you see on a client's screen in a CRM is built from several other tables that sit next to the contact: notes you typed after calls, the email thread, the appointment history, the deal and what stage it reached, the invoices, the signed contract PDF, files they uploaded through a form. Those mostly do not ride along in the contacts CSV.

Some of them have their own export. HubSpot, for example, lets you export deals, companies and other record types separately from contacts. Invoicing tools usually export invoices as their own report. Others, especially email threads and attached files, often have no bulk export at all, and the honest answer is that you either download what matters by hand or accept that the old tool is the archive.

Before you cancel anything, open three of your best clients in the old tool and write down what you'd be upset to lose. Then check whether each item came out in a file. That ten-minute test catches more problems than reading any help article.

Your contacts are probably spread across four or five tools

"Export my contacts" sounds like one job. For most small businesses it's four or five, because every tool you pay for keeps its own list of the same people.

Take an example: a wedding photographer, call her Dana. Her clients first show up as inquiries through a contact form. They book a consultation through a scheduling tool. They get a quote and contract in a client-management app. They pay through QuickBooks. Past clients get a seasonal newsletter from Mailchimp. And half her real conversations happen in Gmail, so Google Contacts has picked up hundreds of addresses on its own.

That's six lists. None of them is complete. The scheduling tool has people who booked a call and never hired her. QuickBooks has the billing contact, which is sometimes the bride's mother. Mailchimp has people who signed up at a bridal fair and never booked anything.

So the first real step is to make a list of every tool that has a customer's name in it, export each one, and save the files in one folder with the tool name and date in the filename, for example mailchimp-2026-10-19.csv. Don't merge anything yet. Just get the raw files out while you still have access.

If you're paying for all of those tools at once, that's the problem this whole pillar is about. The tradeoffs of replacing them with one platform, including the free ones that charge you somewhere else, are covered in what free all-in-one business software actually costs.

Export the people who unsubscribed, or you will email them again

This is the step most guides skip, and it's the one that can get you into trouble.

When someone unsubscribes from your emails, your email tool keeps them on the list but marks them as unsubscribed so it never mails them. Mailchimp's export, for instance, splits contacts into separate files: subscribed, unsubscribed, and cleaned (addresses that bounced). If you only import the subscribed file into your new tool, fine. If you merge everything into one big sheet and import it all as "subscribed," you've just quietly re-subscribed everyone who asked you to stop.

In the US, the CAN-SPAM Act requires you to honor opt-out requests and keep honoring them; the FTC's compliance guide is explicit that you can't keep emailing people who opted out. In the UK and EU, the rules on marketing consent are stricter still. Moving software doesn't reset anyone's preferences.

What to do:

• Export the unsubscribed and bounced lists as their own files and keep them.
• Add a column to your master sheet called email_status and fill it in from those files before you import.
• In the new tool, import the unsubscribed people as unsubscribed, or into its suppression or do-not-email list if it has one. If it has neither, keep them out of any list you send marketing to.

Bounced addresses are worth dropping entirely. Sending to dead addresses from a new tool hurts your sender reputation, and a new sending setup has no reputation to spare.

On an agency platform, the export button may not be yours to press

If a marketing agency set up your CRM for you, the account you log into is often a sub-account inside their platform. They pay the software company; you pay them. That arrangement changes who controls the export.

On these platforms, the agency decides what each user is allowed to do. Exporting contacts is commonly a permission that can be switched off for client logins. If you select your contacts and there's no Export option, or it's greyed out, that's usually why. It isn't a bug and the software company's support team generally can't override it, because you aren't their customer.

Three things help:

1. Ask for the export before you give notice. Relationships get slower once someone knows you're leaving. Ask for a full contact export, plus opportunities or pipeline, appointments, and invoices if they live there, as a routine "we'd like a backup" request.
2. Ask in writing, and name the files you want. "Please send all contacts with all custom fields and tags, including unsubscribed contacts, as CSV" is harder to half-answer than "can we get our data?"
3. Read your agreement. Look for who owns the customer data and what happens to the account when the contract ends. If the contract says the data is yours, quote that line. If it says nothing, that's worth knowing before you're negotiating.

Also check your own systems. Your website form may email you every inquiry, and your inbox has years of client conversations. Those copies are yours regardless of what happens to the agency account, and they're a decent fallback if an export arrives incomplete.

Open the file in Google Sheets before Excel mangles it

Once you have five CSV files, you need one clean list. This is where data quietly gets damaged, and the usual culprit is double-clicking a CSV so it opens in Excel.

Excel guesses what each column is. It strips the leading zero from ZIP codes like 02134, turns long numbers into scientific notation, and reformats anything that looks like a date. If you then save, the damage is permanent. Either import the CSV into Google Sheets, which is gentler, or use Excel's import option and set the phone and ZIP columns to Text.

Then merge:

• Match people on email address. Names are unreliable (Jon, Jonathan, J. Smith). Email is the closest thing to a unique key. Lowercase every email first so Dana@Studio.com and dana@studio.com count as the same person.
• Pick one phone format. Some tools store +1 555 010 2030, others (555) 010-2030. The new tool will treat them as different numbers unless you clean them.
• Split names into first and last if the destination wants them separate. Most do.
• Keep a source column saying which tool each row came from. When you find a strange record later, you'll know where to look.
• Turn tags into a single column, separated by commas, and check what the new tool expects before importing.

Before importing, count rows. If Mailchimp said 1,400 contacts and your file has 1,180, find out why. Usually it's duplicates you merged on purpose. Sometimes it's a filter that was still switched on when you clicked Export, which is the most common reason an export is short.

Finally, import a test batch of 20 rows first. Check that names, phones, tags and custom fields landed in the right places, then import the rest.

The order I would do it in

If you're leaving a tool, or consolidating several into one, this sequence avoids the mistakes above:

1. List every tool that holds a customer's name, including Gmail and your phone.
2. Export everything raw, today, while you have access. Save the unsubscribed and bounced lists separately.
3. Pull the non-contact data that matters: deals, appointments, invoices, signed contracts. Download anything with no export by hand.
4. Merge in Google Sheets on lowercase email, clean phones, mark email status.
5. Import a test batch into the new tool, check it, then import the rest. Only cancel the old subscriptions after you've used the new tool for real for a couple of weeks.

Keep the raw export files somewhere safe for good. They're your proof of what you had, and the archive if something didn't come across.

If the place you're moving to is Fynl, it's one portal for the CRM, booking, quotes, invoices and email, so the merged list goes in once instead of five times. It doesn't do SMS or calls yet, so if your old platform handled texting, export your SMS opt-in status too and plan where texting will live. And if you only have one tool and you're happy with it, take an export every few months anyway. A backup you never needed costs nothing.

Questions people also ask

Sources

• Google Contacts Help: Export or back up contacts
• Mailchimp: View or export contacts
• HubSpot Knowledge Base: Export your records
• FTC: CAN-SPAM Act, A Compliance Guide for Business