Yesterday I posted instructions on how to delete unsubscribed and cleaned MailChimp contacts. I’ve had a few queries since whether it’s possible to bulk delete unsubscribed contacts (General Data Protection Regulation GDPR requirements seem to be prompting these questions). Unfortunately I am not aware of a means of quickly deleting many unsubscribed contacts. Below are instructions on the quickest way that I know of to delete unsubscribed contacts.
How to bulk delete MailChimp unsubscribed contacts
Follow these instructions to mass delete your unsubscribed contacts:
- Create a segment where Email Marketing Status is Unsubscribed.
- Whilst viewing the contacts in the segment, change View to 100 (this will be at the bottom of the window).
- Click the empty select box next to each unsubscribed contact.
- Click the Delete button near the top of the page.
- Click Delete again.
If you have more than 100 contacts then you’re able to select then delete 100 contacts at a time.
Hi Gary,
How do we delete multiple cleaned contact? We made a segment, but it is not possible to choose them by using the checkbox. Do we have to delete them one by one?
Thanks,
Peter
Hi Peter,
Unfortunately yes, the cleaned contacts need to be deleted individually 🙁
Just a small addition. There is an arrow pointing down above the checkboxes for the contacts. If you click that it gives you an option to select all on the page.
I have the same problem: We had a quite huge list and did a GDPR campaign. More than 120,000 contacts do not explicitly want to receive further emails. To my understanding to be GDPR compliant we have to delete all data of these 120,000 contacts. Even with “select all” we would have to do that for 1,200 times… Am I wrong or does Mailchimp not provide the tools to be GDPR compliant?
Bulk deleting contacts: At this time, to mass delete contacts at one time (e.g. 120,000) in MailChimp this can only be done via the API. I’m in Australia and am not fully conversant with GDPR but are you sure that you need to delete these people from your list (would unsubscribing them meet the compliance needs?)?
MailChimp GDPR compliance: As far as I’m aware MailChimp is GDPR compliant. If you want to know more then I recommend contacting MailChimp directly.
Hi Gary,
I tried the same method to bulk delete unsubscribed users, well even thought Mailchimp notify me of successfully deleting them. All the users are still in the list when I re-checked.
And when I selected only one user and tried the same, I got the following error:
Error
0 members successfully deleted!
1 email was not included (the contact unsubscribed or has been cleaned).
Am I doing anything wrong ?
Thank you.
I know there were issues yesterday in MailChimp whereby list deletes were taking quite awhile to show. Is all ok now?
Hi Gary,
Thanks for the reply, I tried the same method now. Unfortunately no luck, it’s the same.
But this is the new error when I selected one to delete:
Error
1 contact was not deleted (already unsubscribed, did not opt in to marketing, cleaned).
Thank you.
Hi Gary,
Yes, I think it was problem with MailChimp for few days. It worked.
Thank you 🙂