MailChimp Help: How to Archive Unsubscribed Email Addresses in Mailchimp

In this article, you’ll learn how to archive unsubscribed email addresses in Mailchimp to keep your costs as low as possible.

Updated: August 26, 2019

The option to archive is now under “Remove contacts”. 

By now you’ve heard the news that Mailchimp has changed into a digital marketing platform. They used to be just an email service provider. Now since they’ve added ads and landing pages they’re changing it up to be a digital marketing platform. So what does that mean for people who want to use Mailchimp for just email?

Well, now they’re charging for unsubscribes. And the reason why they’re doing that this is because with ads and remarketing ads you can use unsubscribed email addresses to create those remarketing ads. But if you’re just gonna use it for email you don’t need to have those unsubscribe to email addresses on your list. And you certainly don’t need to get charged for them.

Here’s what you need to do to lower your email costs and remove those unsubscribed email addresses.

On your Mailchimp Dashboard go to Audience

I’m on the dashboard. I’m going to go to audience. You can see I have 731 contacts in this audience and 584 of them are subscribers. The difference between these two numbers is unsubscribes and cleaned email addresses.

Create a segment of your unsubscribed email addresses

The first thing I’m going to do is view contacts and then I’m going to create a new segment. I want to make a segment of just the unsubscribes. The reason why I’m going to make a segment is that segments are automatically updated all the time.

Even though I’m going to delete all these unsubscribes if I have any unsubscribes in the future I can go in on a regular basis and delete them and keep my Mailchimp cost down.

The segment I want to create is -email marketing status is and I unclick subscribe and I’m gonna unclick non-subscribed. Now I have email marketing status is unsubscribed. I’m going to preview this segment. Excellent!

I have 118 contacts. First thing I’m going to do is export this segment. I want to make sure I will always want to have a backup. Now I have a backup of those contacts that were unsubscribed.

I’m going to go back to manage contacts and view contacts.

Archive the unsubscribed email addresses

Excellent! I only have this unsubscribed segment. I’m going to go to this little drop-down arrow and select all visible. Now I have a hundred email address showing here.

I’m going to delete as many as I can at one time. I go to actions. And choose archive. This will take a couple of seconds for this to work. If I refresh I have 18 contacts that match my conditions.

Now I select the visible email addresses and archive again. Now my segment is zero. But in the future when people unsubscribe they will go on this segment. Then it will be easy for me to archive them.

What if you need the unsubscribed email addresses in the future?

If you don’t do ads now but may do ads in the future you can unarchive these email addresses. To do that go to manage contacts and then view archived contacts. And they’re all here.

Click that down arrow select visible and unarchive them if for some reason you wanted to use them in the future.

Now you know how to archive unsubscribed email addresses in Mailchimp.

Want more tips and hints?

Check out these Mailchimp Help videos …

How to Get Notified When People Subscribe to your Mailchimp Email List

Mailchimp Help: How to Add an Admin to Your Mailchimp Account