Mailchimp have recently amended how contacts are deleted (removed) from an Audience. Contacts may now be archived or permanently deleted (read more about permanently deleting Mailchimp contacts).
The Difference Between Archiving and Permanently Deleting a Mailchimp Contact
A contact that is permanently deleted cannot be re-added to an Audience. In addition a contact that is permanently deleted has their data removed from Mailchimp reports.
A contact that is archived may be added back into a Mailchimp Audience and data are not removed from reports.
The video below shows the difference between archiving and permanently deleting a Mailchimp contact.
Instructions to Archive a Mailchimp Contact
Time needed: 5 minutes.
Archiving a single contact, or multiple contacts, in a Mailchimp Audience is simple. The steps below described how to archive Mailchimp contacts.
- View your Mailchimp Audience
Login to your Mailchimp account and click “Audience” in the main horizontal menu. Ensure that you are in the Audience from which you want to delete contacts by selecting your preferred Audience in the “Current audience” drop-down field.
- Select the contacts to archive
View your contacts by clicking the “View Contacts” button. Create and view a segment of the contacts you want to archive (e.g. all unsubscribed contacts) and click the down arrow to the left of the “Email Address” column to select all contacts in your segment. To select contacts without segmenting merely click in the empty box to the left of each contact you want to archive.
- Archive your selected contacts
In the previous step you selected the contacts you wanted to archive. To archive the selected contacts, click “Actions” then “Archive” then “Confirm.
- Check and unarchive your archived contacts
To check on your contacts that are archived in Mailchimp; view your contacts, click “Manage contacts” then “View archived contacts”. You’ll be able to select contacts and unarchive those contacts.
Yes, I’ve reviewed all your materials and am frustrated there’s nothing that speaks to how to bulk delete contacts. It will be too timely to go 1 by one through my list of 900 contacts to find the unsubscribed ones to delete. It’s unclear from your video and from your text.
Why did MailChimp do this? It was so easy before.
Hi Shara, I share your frustration; unfortunately I don’t know of any means of bulk deleting contacts 🙁
Does archiving a contact remove them from your subscribed list? If I archive a contact and then send a newsletter out, will they still receive it? I went through and archived a bunch of contacts thinking it would unsubscribe them also but now I am not sure that’s the case.
Hi Chelsea, archiving doesn’t unsubscribed contacts but rather places them in an archive. You won’t eb able to send to archived contacts unless you unarchive them.