As a business owner or marketing professional, it’s important to keep your email marketing list clean and up-to-date. Utilizing the full potential of your Mailchimp contacts is essential in ensuring the success of your campaigns and maintaining a strong relationship with your audience. However, there are times when your contact list may include duplicate or outdated records, as well as those who rarely (if at all) interact with your campaigns.
The good news is there’s a solution to this – archiving contacts in Mailchimp.
Archiving contacts is a valuable feature in Mailchimp that allows you to keep your marketing audience relevant and fresh without deleting any valuable information or data. This process temporarily removes select contacts from your audience list, ensuring that your marketing efforts are directed toward genuinely interested readers.
If ever you decide to reintegrate these archived contacts into your campaigns or if you’d like to experiment with new strategies catered to them, restoring them to your list is a simple and easy option.
In this blog post, we’ll take a deep dive into the step-by-step instructions on how to execute this process.
How to Archive Contacts in Mailchimp (Step-by-Step Process)
Before diving into the archiving process, it’s crucial to be aware that archiving contacts is not a legal substitute for deletion.
Compliance with data privacy regulations should always be a top priority, as non-compliance can lead to harsh penalties and damage your business’s reputation.
- General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) for businesses based in Europe.
- California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) for businesses based in the USA.
Now let’s get started on how to do it:
We’ve outlined two methods that can be used to archive contacts in Mailchimp.
Both methods are easy to follow and will ensure you maintain a clean and relevant email list.
Method 1: Archiving Contacts One by One
1. First, navigate to your Mailchimp dashboard and click on “All contacts” under the “Audience” tab.
2. Locate your list of contacts. If you have multiple audiences, simply click the “Current Audience” drop-down menu and select the desired audience.
3. Scan through your contacts list, and check the boxes next to the individual contacts you wish to archive.
4. After selecting the desired contacts, click on the “Actions” drop-down menu, and choose “Archive.”
5. A pop-up window will appear asking for confirmation. Click “Confirm” to proceed with archiving the selected contacts.
Method 2: Archiving All Contacts in an Audience
If your entire email audience consists of outdated information or duplicates, you may want to archive all of its contacts at once.
Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to accomplish this:
1. Begin by logging in to your Mailchimp dashboard, and select the “Audience” tab.
2. Click on the “All Contacts” button.
3. If you have multiple audiences, click on the “Current Audience” drop-down menu and choose the audience you want to archive.
4. Next, locate and click on the “Manage Contacts” drop-down menu, then select “Archive All Contacts.”
5. To confirm that you indeed want to archive all contacts in the selected audience, you’ll be asked to type “ARCHIVE” in the provided text field.
6. After entering the word “ARCHIVE,” click on the “Archive All Contacts” button to complete the process.
To access your saved contacts that have been archived, locate and click on the “Manage contacts” drop-down menu. From the list of options, select “View archived contacts” to display the comprehensive list of contacts that have been previously stored away.
How to Unarchive your contacts
Upon unarchiving a contact from the archived contacts page, they will reappear in your audience list, maintaining their original email marketing status. Unarchiving contacts allows you to reintegrate them into your campaigns and engage with them further.
To unarchive one or more contacts, simply follow these step-by-step instructions:
1. Click on the “Audience” tab in your Mailchimp dashboard.
2. Select “All contacts” to view your entire list of contacts.
3. If you have multiple audiences, click on the “Current Audience” drop-down menu and choose the audience you wish to work with.
4. Locate the “Manage Contacts” drop-down menu and select “View Archived Contacts.” This will take you to your archived contacts page.
5. On your archived contacts page, you have the option to export all archived contacts, access individual contact profile pages, or unarchive contacts as necessary. This provides flexibility in managing your archived contacts and helps you re-engage with them effectively.
6. To unarchive contacts, check the box next to each contact you wish to restore to your audience list.
7. Click the “Unarchive” button to complete the process.
Well done! Your unarchived contacts will now be visible in your audience’s contact table, showcasing their appropriate email marketing status.
