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The people whose information you store in your Mailchimp account are known as your contacts. A person’s contact type determines which campaigns they’re eligible for, and whether they count toward your plan's monthly contact limit.
In this article, you’ll learn more about the types of contacts in Mailchimp and where to view them.
Things to know
- If you have a legacy paid plan created before May 15, 2019, your account may be subject to different rules around contact limits. To learn more, read About Your Legacy Pricing Plan.
- Laws in different jurisdictions may prevent certain types of content from being sent, regardless of your pricing plan, our system capabilities, or your contacts’ marketing status. We recommend you always establish a legal basis for the collection, storage, and use of your contacts' personal data.
Types of contacts
Even though you can use Mailchimp for more than email, we categorize the main types of contacts based on their email marketing status: subscribed, unsubscribed, non-subscribed, cleaned, and pending. Contacts can also be archived, which removes them from your marketing audience but retains their data.
Here’s an overview of the different contact types, including whether they count toward monthly plan limits and what type of marketing they can receive from you.
Subscribed
A subscribed contact, or subscriber, is someone who has opted in to receive your email marketing. Subscribers can join your audience from one of your signup forms, landing pages, or connected stores. You can also manually add them one-by-one or with an import, as long as you’ve received explicit permission. They’ll have a Subscribed badge in the Email Marketing column of the contact table.
Counts toward monthly plan limit?: Yes
Can receive: All types of marketing
Unsubscribed
An unsubscribed contact is someone who previously received your email marketing but has opted out. They’ll have an Unsubscribed badge in the Email Marketing column of the contact table.
Counts toward monthly plan limit?: Yes
Can receive: Ads, postcards, and transactional emails like order notifications
Cannot receive: Marketing emails
Non-subscribed
A non-subscribed contact is someone who has interacted with you but hasn’t opted in to receive email marketing campaigns. These contacts can be from your online store, an integration, a manual import, or from a forwarded email to your Mailchimp Inbox. They won’t have a badge in the Email Marketing column of the contact table.
Counts toward monthly plan limit?: Yes
Can receive: Ads, postcards, and transactional emails like order notifications
Cannot receive: Marketing emails
Cleaned
Hard bounces and repeated soft bounces become cleaned contacts. A cleaned contact has a non-deliverable email address, which might be misspelled or invalid. They’ll have a Cleaned badge in the Email Marketing column of the contact table.
Counts toward monthly plan limit?: No
Can receive: Nothing
Pending
A pending contact is someone who has completed a signup form but has not confirmed their opt-in. The contact's email address won't be added to your audience until they confirm their opt-in, and you won't be able to view them in your audience. After 60 days, if they have not confirmed their opt-in, the contact's email address and any other information they provided will be removed and deleted.
Counts toward monthly plan limit?: No
Can receive: Nothing
Archived
Archived contacts are contacts who have been removed from your marketing audience. As long as a contact remains archived, you won’t be able to edit their profile or send them any marketing communications. However, you’ll retain all of their data, including identifiable information in campaign reports.
Counts toward monthly plan limit?: No
Can receive: Nothing
Archive or Unarchive Your Contacts
Deleted
Deleted contacts are contacts you permanently remove. This removes all of their personal information from your audience. This action cannot be undone. In most cases, if you have outdated or inactive contacts that don’t interact with your campaigns, you should choose to archive them. Delete contacts for General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) purposes only.
Counts toward monthly plan limit?: NoCan receive: Nothing
Sort your audience by contact type
To view subscribed, unsubscribed, non-subscribed, or cleaned contacts only, you’ll use the Email Marketing column.
- Click Audience.
- Click All contacts.
- If you have more than one audience, click the Current audience drop-down and choose the one you want to work with.
- Locate the Email Marketing column of the contact table.
This column displays badges to indicate each contact's type. - Click the arrow to sort your audience by contact type.
You can also create and save a segment for each contact type based on email marketing status.
View archived contacts
Archived contacts are stored separately from other contacts in your audience. To view your archived contacts, follow these steps.
- Click Audience.
- Click All contacts.
- If you have more than one audience, click the Current audience drop-down and choose the one you want to work with.
- Click the Manage contacts drop-down and choose View archived contacts.
We’ll display all of the archived contacts in your audience. From here, you can export all of your archived contacts, access their contact profile pages, or unarchive them as needed.
