All About the Mailchimp Email Marketing Status Field

The Email Marketing field in Mailchimp determines if email marketing campaigns may be sent to the contact and, if not, the reason that email campaigns may not be sent to that contact.
There are four possible value that may be present in the Email Marketing field; Subscribed, Unsubscribed, Cleaned and Non-subscribed (i.e. an empty value).

The email marketing status of Subscribed demonstrates that you are able to send email marketing to that person.

An email marketing status of Unsubscribed means that the contact has clicked the unsubscribe link in an email message or has been unsubscribed in another way. It isn’t possible in Mailchimp to send an email campaign to a contact where the email address has a status of Unsubscribed.
Note that if a contact unsubscribes from an email campaign sent from a specific Audience then that contact won’t be unsubscribed from other Audiences where that email address appears i.e. the Unsubscribe status is Audience specific.

The Cleaned Email Marketing status illustrates that Mailchimp is unable to send to that email address. Common causes of a status of Cleaned include; a spelling mistake in the email address, the email address no longer exists and the domain name in the email address has changed.
The email address is marked as Cleaned in Mailchimp when the email address results in a hard bounce or multiple soft bounces. It isn’t possible in Mailchimp to send email marketing to Cleaned email addresses.

An empty value in the Email Marketing filed is also called Non-subscribed. This indicates that the contact has been added to your audience but has not agreed to receive email marketing (however you could still market to those people using Facebook Ads or other marketing channels that Mailchimp provide). For example the contact may have been added as they purchased on your Shopify or WooCommerce Online store but haven’t agreed that they want to receive your email marketing.
You won’t be able to send email marketing to Non-subscribed contacts in Mailchimp.

In Mailchimp, all contacts that have an email marketing status of Subscribed, Unsubscribed or Non-Subscribed count towards the amount that you are billed each month (except if you’re on a legacy billing plan).