Email Marketing, Mailchimp

Archive Unsubscribes in Mailchimp

Posted on
by

Unsubscribes in email marketing are an inevitability and not always a bad thing – indeed I like to look at it that your database quality actually improves with every unsubscribe, because you’re emailing people who actually want to hear from you.

Let’s have a look at cleaning up your audiences and doing what we can at an audience level to ensure better open rates, engagement and sales.

Audience Overview

You should be aiming for the following:

  • That you are working from a clean, well-segmented, and up-to-date database.  Do not ever be tempted to buy or rent an audience!
  • In general, one master audience is the way to go. You use tagging and segments to identify information about the audience members.
  • Regularly archive your unsubscribes.  You cannot email these people ever, so make sure you are not paying to have them on your database or that they aren’t counting towards your audience count when it comes to billing thresholds. The audience below as 4000 people that are not subscribed – time for some action!

How to Archive your Unsubscribes

Step 1: Create a segment of all your unsubscribes

Before you start

  • To find out why a contact unsubscribed from your email marketing, enable the unsubscribe reason survey. You can review the results in campaign reports and individual contact profiles.

View unsubscribed contacts

To view your unsubscribed contacts, you’ll need to create a segment of them in your audience.

  1. Click the Audience icon.
    Cursor Clicks - Audience icon
  2. Click All contacts.
    Cursor Clicks - All contacts
  3. If you have more than one audience, click the Current audience drop-down and choose the one you want to work with.
  4. Click New Segment.
  5. Set the drop-down menus to Email Marketing Status | is | Unsubscribed.
  6. Click Preview Segment.

When you preview your segment, you’ll see only the unsubscribed contacts in your audience. To further refine your segment, click Edit. To save your segment of unsubscribed contacts, click Save segment. If you choose to save your segment, you can export it to a CSV.

Save and Manage Segments

View or Export a Segment

To resubscribe a contact, they’ll have to physically opt back in to receive your campaigns – you aren’t able to do this from your end.

Step 2: Archive The Unsubscribe Segment

  • Click the Audience icon
  • Click Segments
    • View the Unscubcribe segment you just created
    • Tap the arrow next too the Email Address column and hit Select All
    • Click on Actions and hit Archive

    You will be asked to confirm you want to Archive and once you do, you’re done!

    Definitions – what does it all mean?

    • Subscribed contact: Someone who is opted in to receive your email marketing campaigns. Can receive emails
    • Unsubscribed contact: Someone who was opted in to receive your email marketing campaigns, but isn’t currently. Cannot receive emails
    • Non-subscribed contact: Someone who has interacted with your online store, but hasn’t opted in to receive your email marketing campaigns. Cannot receive emails
    • Cleaned contact: A non-deliverable email address. Hard bounces, as well as repeated soft bounces, become cleaned addresses. Cleaned contacts don’t count toward audience limits and cannot be archived, your best bet is to delete them – follow the steps above to create a segment just like you did above but instead of archiving you delete them. Cannot receive emails

    Get in touch if you want it done for you – happy to help!

    Sign up to occasionally hear from me with mind-blowing SEO & conversion rate hacks straight to your inbox.

    Redhead Digital Shopify & Wordpress Results
    No spam here. Seriously worthwhile info only and of course you can unsub at any time.