Mailchimp takes unsubscribed and cleaned contacts seriously…  and for good reason.

If an email address is unsubscribed from a Mailchimp audience… Mailchimp does not want ANY emails sent to this address.

If it tries to send, it’s highly likely that it will generate an “abuse” claim, which not only impacts your ability to send emails but also Mailchimp – and let’s remember, Mailchimp has one main goal… to get your emails delivered, and so anything that will negatively impact this is not something it’ll look kindly on.

It’s the same with addresses that are showing as “cleaned”. A cleaned contact is an email address that Mailchimp has identified as being,… well… dead.

…and again, if Mailchimp gets shown as sending emails to addresses that are dead… it’s going to get a black mark against it, and it doesn’t want that.

So ultimately, when someone is shown as being unsubscribed or cleaned, Mailchimp does not want any emails sent to these email addresses.

You can learn all about the way Mailchimp classifies contacts and what it really means here.

This means it makes it really hard for you to change someone’s status and information if they’re unsubscribed or cleaned – even if it happened by mistake!

This is perfectly understandable from Mailchimp’s point of view… but it does create issues for you if they were unsubscribed or cleaned incorrectly.

So what can you do?

If they were unsubscribed manually by yourself

If you are the reason that they are unsubscribed, then it’s actually pretty easy to resubscribe the contact yourself.

All you need to do is go into the contact information page (click on the email in your database view)… and then click the drop down menu at the top right and select subscribe. 

Mailchimp will then check to make sure you want to resubscribe the contact and when you do, will add them back to the audience as live.

Pretty simple.

…but what about those contacts who accidentally unsubscribed themselves?… or who are showing as cleaned but are actually a real email address?

Doable… but the process is a bit more involved

If the contact unsubscribed themselves or were marked as cleaned

OK, firstly, a disclaimer… when a contact unsubscribes… it usually means they don’t want your emails – so if you’re looking to get them back to a subscribed state, you need to be sure that they want to. Otherwise they’ll re-unsubscribe and complain – which is not good for you and not good for Mailchimp.

..the same goes for cleaned email addresses. A cleaned email means that Mailchimp has tried to send emails to the address, but it’s not accepting them, either because the address doesn’t exist or because it’s full and rejecting any received emails. So only reactivate an email address if you’re 100% sure it’s valid and wants your communication – otherwise you’ll have issues as outlined previously.

So how can you do it?  How can you “reanimate the dead” in your email list?

Well, firstly, you can’t do it in bulk (otherwise there would be lots of unscrupulous people resubscribing unsubscribes to send more spam – not good!).

The only way to reanimate these contacts is one by one… and it requires the use of a Mailchimp created form.

Think about it… if someone who was unsubscribed or cleaned decided they wanted back in on your communication, they’d use a form to do so – and Mailchimp would be like “ok… so they’ve resubscribed via a form… so it must be them, we’ll reactivate them”.

…which means if you’re 100% certain they want to be added back as a subscriber (and we mean 100%, not “I’m sure they unsubscribed by mistake”), you can complete the form on their behalf.

The best form to do this with is the “hosted” form that Mailchimp gives everyone ‘out of the box’ for each audience.

You can find this form in the “other forms” section of your Mailchimp account (within the Forms section).

Click and then select the form builder option at the bottom of the page.

When selected you will then be shown the “hosted form” that you’ve got… and the “signup form URL”… it’ll usually have a domain including eepurl.

This is the link to the form that Mailchimp has created and hosted for you.

So all you then need to do is visit this url and complete it on behalf of the subscriber.

Again, and we really want to emphasise this – only do this if you’re 100% sure that the person wants to resubscribe – and if you’re not 100% certain, then just send them the link to the form so that they can resubscribe themselves – that way you can be sure the want to be added back.

Wrapping Up

The fact is that sometimes mistakes happen. Contacts unsubscribe accidentally and then realise that they can’t live without you!… or their email gets clogged up and so gets cleaned… but they’ve sorted it out and are happy to be back on the active list.

It may not be as simple as clicking a button, but no matter why they were unsubscribed or cleaned… you can still reactivate them and ensure they continue to get emails you create.