As email marketers, we all know the important thing is to get our messages delivered to as much of our audience as possible according to relevancy. But what do we do with those contacts who decide they no longer want to hear from us? Do you just ignore the unsubscribes and allow those records to accumulate? Well, if you’re a Mailchimp user, it could cost you money.
Mailchimp is a hugely popular choice as an email marketing platform and the functionality is growing every year. Ensuring you know how it all works is critical to ensuring you’re getting the most from it, that you’re not paying for things when you don’t have to, and that you’re keeping up with any changes. That kind of awareness is usually fairly time-consuming. Luckily for you, we’re a Mailchimp expert, so we’re in a position to make life a bit easier for you!
Here’s one function you really need to be aware of: Mailchimp counts all contacts as chargeable, even if they’ve unsubscribed from receiving your emails. That means you end up paying for dead data, and, depending on your budget, you’re missing out on sending to new sign-ups.
At Email-Postman, we are always talking about the reasons for ensuring your email list is current and relevant. A key factor in the success of any email campaign lies in the validity and quality of the email addresses you hold. If you’re getting a lot of hard bounces, your data needs a cleanse! Apart from making your campaigns more successful, increasing your delivery rate, weeding out the contact details of people who no longer want to hear from you is good practice for UK-GDPR compliance. Anyway, if they don’t want to receive your message, they’re not your audience. Cleanse the data, reduce your liability, and replace it with better data!
Mailchimp is growing; as a platform, it’s offering more and more functionality and is fast becoming a comprehensive marketing platform offering such features as ad retargeting, social posting, and multi-channel campaigns, as well as CRM and the email marketing function we all know and love it for. However, as a multi-functional marketing suite, Mailchimp now counts all your contacts live, even if they’ve unsubscribed to email marketing. It makes sense – just because someone doesn’t want the emails doesn’t mean they’re no longer a valid contact for other marketing activities. So, if you have 2000 audience members (Mailchimp calls contacts ‘audience’), but some of those 2000 have unsubscribed to email marketing, you’re still going to end up being bumped up a price bracket.
The good news, though, is you don’t have to lose their data completely. You can simply archive it, and then, should there be a good (UK-GDPR compliant!) reason for reactivating them, the details are all still there.
- Login to your Mailchimp account
- Under audience tab click “all contacts”
- Create a segment by clicking “new segment”
- Select “Unsubscribed” from the “email marketing status” and press preview
- Now click top the drop arrow top left of the audience (just under “filter by tags”) then “select all”
- Then select “actions”
- Click on archive and choose “Confirm”
You can check whether you’ve done it right by returning to the main audience page and seeing your total audience number matches the subscribers. Job done!
Email-Postman – email marketing that delivers!
Shaun Reynolds has been specialising in email marketing since 2005 and, in February 2019, launched Email-Postman. Since then, Email-Postman has helped over 100 clients build successful email marketing campaigns across a range of email marketing platforms. For further information or to discuss getting help with your email marketing, you can arrange a call-back by clicking here!
