Migrate from ActiveCampaign to Thawly

Move your lost deals from ActiveCampaign's CRM module to Thawly in 10 minutes. ActiveCampaign is primarily a marketing-automation platform, so its CRM is the Deals module added on its Plus, Professional and Enterprise plans. The export route uses a saved Deal Filter plus the Export to CSV action.

What you need#

• An ActiveCampaign user with Manage Deals and Export Data permissions. Default Admin and Sales Manager roles include both; sales-rep roles often have export too. If you can see the Export option on the Deals list, you're set.
• A modern browser. No ActiveCampaign API token, no automation builder needed.
• A Plus, Professional or Enterprise subscription — the Deals module isn't available on the Lite plan.
• About 10 minutes.

If your admin has restricted export, ask them to flip the Export Data permission for your role under Settings → Users → Permissions.

Step-by-step extraction#

1. Log in to ActiveCampaign at your account URL (typically your-account.activehosted.com).
2. From the top nav, click Deals. [Screenshot: ActiveCampaign top nav with Deals selected]
3. Switch from kanban view to List view using the toggle at the top right.
4. Apply filters from the filter panel:
   • Status → Lost.
   • Pipeline → your sales pipeline (skip the marketing-handoff or onboarding pipelines).
   • Optionally Close Date → Last 3 years.
5. Add the columns you want visible from the column-picker icon. Tick at minimum: Title (the deal name), Organization (the company linked to the deal), Value, Close Date, Lost Reason, Description, plus any custom fields. [Screenshot: ActiveCampaign Deals list view with column picker open]
6. Save the filter as Lost deals for Thawly so you can re-run it later.
7. With the filtered list visible, click the ⋯ (more actions) menu top-right of the list and choose Export to CSV.
8. In the export dialogue, confirm the format is CSV. ActiveCampaign generates the file and emails you a download link, usually within a minute. For larger exports, the file lands under Settings → Account → Exports.
9. Download the CSV. Open it in Excel or Google Sheets to sanity-check the row count before uploading.

Field mapping#

Thawly's importer auto-maps any reasonable header. For reference:

• Organization → name (used for Companies House matching)
• Value → deal_value (GBP — strip any currency prefix)
• Close Date → lost_date
• Lost Reason → lost_reason
• Custom Competitor field → lost_to
• Description + custom long-text note fields → notes

ActiveCampaign's Deals module attaches each deal to either a Contact or an Organization (or both). For B2B, the Organization is what Thawly wants. Make sure the Organization column is included in the export — if your team only attaches deals to Contacts, the linked organisation may be empty.

What to do with the Notes column#

Don't pre-clean. ActiveCampaign stores deal notes in the Description field plus a related-list Notes entity. Paste the raw Description straight in. Thawly's AI summarises long activity logs and extracts structured signals (objection type, decision-maker title, competitor name, budget threshold) on its own.

If your team uses ActiveCampaign's Conversations feature (live chat plus historical email threads), the relevant context isn't on the deal record. Add the Most Recent Activity Summary column from the related Contact's record — it concatenates the latest interaction text into a single cell.

Common gotchas#

• Duplicate companies. ActiveCampaign allows multiple deals against the same Organization (Brackenfield Estates Ltd lost twice in 2024). Thawly de-duplicates on lower-cased company name on import, so duplicates in the CSV are safe.
• Currency mismatches. ActiveCampaign Deals supports multi-currency. The Value column is in the deal's local currency. Either filter to Currency = GBP before exporting, or post-process to drop non-GBP rows. Mixing currencies skews Thawly's prioritisation.
• Multi-pipeline issues. Many ActiveCampaign teams use one pipeline for sales and another for Marketing Qualified Leads or onboarding. The Lost status appears across all pipelines. Filter on Pipeline = your sales pipeline explicitly — pulling a marketing pipeline's "lost" rows (typically meaning "didn't convert to MQL") produces noise.
• Stale "won" or "open" deals. Status = Lost is the safe filter. Don't rely on a stage filter alone — ActiveCampaign lets a deal sit in any stage with status still Open. Sanity-check the Close Date column has a value on every export row.
• Contact-centric data model. ActiveCampaign is contact-first by design — its CRM is bolted on top of the email-marketing engine. If your team is using ActiveCampaign mostly for marketing automation and Deals only sporadically, you may find the lost-deal data is sparse. The CSV will still work, but expect some rows where the Organization or Lost Reason is blank.

What happens next#

Drop the CSV at thawly.co.uk/upload. We auto-map the columns, run a Companies House lookup on every Organization name and show you a per-row preview before importing.

After import, monitoring runs on the next signal-source pass. Your first digest only lands when there's a real signal — see Reading your digest.

Coming from a different CRM?#

• Migrate from HubSpot — common landing place for teams moving off ActiveCampaign's marketing-first CRM.
• Migrate from EngageBay — similar marketing-plus-CRM tool with a comparable export pattern.
• Migrate from a spreadsheet — if you'd rather clean the data in Excel first.

For the bigger picture, read Dead deal recovery and Buying signals in B2B sales.