Mailchimp does one thing

The first thing you always need to remember is that Mailchimp does one thing, one sole objective.

It gets emails into people’s inboxes.

If it can’t get an email into an inbox, it doesn’t have a business model, and so it’s going to do everything in it’s power to protect it’s ability to deliver.

A key way to ensure this is the case is through making sure it doesn’t get any ‘negative marks’ against it from the people who control the inboxes we all send to (e.g. gmail, yahoo, etc). It needs to maintain a good reputation as a sender.

…and to do this, it needs to avoid doing things that spammers are recognised as doing – such as sending emails to people who either don’t exist or don’t want to receive them.

Every time an email that Mailchimp sends goes undelivered, because the address doesn’t exist, or the email sent results in an unsubscribe, or even worse a spam complaint, this impacts Mailchimp’s future ability to send emails into inboxes.

So it needs to protect itself against these actions….which leads us back to unsubscribed and cleaned email addresses.

The Unsubscribed

One of the’ terms of service’ of Mailchimp is that every email it sends on your behalf must have an unsubscribe link. The reason for this is so that there is a managed way for people to effectively stop receiving emails from a sender.

…but the real reason is to take the ‘unsubscribe’ process out of your hands so that there is no chance at all you can abuse the system.

Remember, every time an email gets sent to someone who has stated they don’t want it – and they complain – this affects Mailchimp.

So by taking the unsubscribe process out of your hands, it ensures that this never happens and so is doing it’s best to protect itself.

This is why you can’t just go in and resubscribe someone who has unsubscribed. In fact the only way to resubscribe someone who has unsubscribed is to get them to complete a Mailchimp form and reconfirm. (Small aside, there’s nothing stopping you from doing this yourself manually, but remember, if you abuse this you’re not just hurting yourself, you’re hurting everybody).

So, Mailchimp keeps unsubscribes visible on your audience. It doesn’t actually remove them because of the fact you can use the information on this person for other purposes (Retargeting/Postcards) within Mailchimp.

However, if you aren’t going to do either of these things, then the best thing to do is to identify all those who are unsubscribed and archive them.

Archiving them removes them as ‘valid’ contacts on your system, which means that they don’t count against your overall Mailchimp bill (n.b. this doesn’t affect those who are on legacy accounts).

To conclude on what to do with Unsubscribes…If you aren’t using any of mailchimp’s other marketing tools, it’s best to Archive them (and even if you’re on a legacy account and don’t get charged for unsubscribed contacts, it’s not a bad idea to archive them as there isn’t a penalty for doing so).

Also, if someone does decide they want to come back to you and completes a form, they’ll automatically be moved from the archive list back to the main list as a live subscriber.

The cleaned

Where an unsubscribe is someone saying they don’t want to hear from you, someone who’s address is ‘cleaned’ is someone saying they can’t hear from you.

A cleaned email address is as far as Mailchimp’s concerned, a dead email address and one that cannot be contacted.

In most instances, this is because the email address either doesn’t exist, which is known as a ‘hard’ bounce, or it can’t accept any emails at the moment (it could be full), which is known as a soft bounce.

Hard bounces will be marked on your email database as cleaned. Soft bounces will have several attempts to get your email through, but if it fails, then it will be also marked as cleaned.

Sending an email to someone who’s unsubscribed is not a good thing, but sending an email to an address that doesn’t exist is even worse.

This is why you can move unsubscribes to be archived… but you can’t do a thing with the cleaned email addresses. They are kept in your account so that they don’t get misused/ignored.

I understand that this can be frustrating if you like things neat and tidy, but it’s just the way things are…and you don’t need to worry as you don’t get charged by Mailchimp for these non existent email addresses.

So, the simple answer to; “what to do with cleaned email addresses in your database?”… is to do nothing!  They aren’t causing you an issue or costing you money, they can’t be archived or deleted… so just leave them be!

To Archive or Delete

Another question that often gets asked in this arena is whether you should archive or delete contacts?

Personally, unless you’ve got a specific reason for someone to be deleted (e.g. there was a request from someone to be deleted on the basis of GDPR), then you should archive.

Archive keeps the contacts information and details in place should they ever decide to resubscribe (and means you can find the data if someone starts saying why have their emails stopped) – delete removes them completely.

Unless you’ve a really good reason, just use the archive function.

Wrapping Up

Mailchimp is a great system for email marketing and one of the key benefits is that they handle lots of the heavy lifting – managing unsubscribed emails and emails that don’t exist – without you having to get involved.

The one thing you do need to do regularly though is review your unsubscribes.

If you’re using the data for postcards or targeting, you can keep them, but otherwise I’d recommend you archive them – it’ll save you money if you’re on a standard/essentials plan, it’ll reduce your subscriber count if you’re trying to keep under the 2,000 limit on a free plan – and even if you’re on a legacy plan, it’s just good practice to keep things tidy.

…and don’t worry about cleaned emails, they may look a bit messy, but there not doing you any harm at all and are actually protecting you (and Mailchimp) from bad email practice.

Just like those TV subscriptions you keep paying for which you know you should probably cancel, if you don’t archive your unsubscribes, it’s likely your paying money for things you don’t need.