Archive or Unarchive Your Contacts

Archive contacts to remove them from your audience without losing any data. This is helpful if you have duplicate, outdated, or inactive contacts who don’t interact with your email or SMS marketing. If you change your mind or want to try a new strategy, you can always unarchive them later.

In this article, you’ll learn how to archive or unarchive your contacts in Mailchimp.

Before you start

Here are some things to know before you start.

• For General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) purposes, archiving is not a legal substitute for deletion. If an EU contact asks to be removed from your account, you must permanently delete them from all audiences in which their data is stored. To learn how, check out Delete Contacts.
• Cleaned email contacts don't count toward audience limits and can't be archived.

About archiving

When you archive an email or SMS contact, you remove them from the contact table and add them to a separate archived contacts page. 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 email or SMS reports. Archived contacts don’t count toward your billing.

You can unarchive a contact at any time, either directly from the archived contacts page or with an import. A contact can also unarchive themselves if they sign up through your Mailchimp signup form or interact with your connected online store.

Archive your contacts

To select and archive specific contacts, follow these steps.

1. Click Audience, then click All contacts.
   
2. If you have more than 1 audience, click the Current audience drop-down and choose the one you want to work with.
3. Check the box next to each contact you want to archive.
4. Click the three vertical dots, then choose Archive contacts.
5. In the Archive contacts pop-up modal, type ARCHIVE and click Archive.

Nice job! We’ll display a success message that tells you how many contacts you archived.

Archive all contacts in an audience

If your entire audience is outdated or duplicated, you may want to archive all of its contacts at once.

To archive all of the contacts in an audience, follow these steps.

1. Click Audience, then click All contacts.
   
2. If you have more than 1 audience, click the Current audience drop-down and choose the one you want to work with.
3. Click the Manage audience drop-down, then click Archive all contacts.
4. Type ARCHIVE in the available field, then click Archive All Contacts to confirm.

View archived contacts

To view your archived contacts, click the Manage audience drop-down, then click View archived contacts.

Unarchive your contacts

When you unarchive a contact from the archived contacts page, they’ll appear back in your audience with the appropriate email marketing or SMS subscription status.

To unarchive 1 or more contacts, follow these steps.

1. Click Audience, then click All contacts.
   
2. If you have more than 1 audience, click the Current audience drop-down and choose the one you want to work with.
3. Click the Manage audience drop-down and choose View archived contacts.
4. On your archived contacts page, you can export all of your archived contacts, access their contact profile pages, or unarchive them as needed.
5. Check the box next to each contact you want to unarchive.
6. Click Unarchive.

Great work. Your unarchived contacts will appear back in your audience’s contact table with the appropriate email marketing or SMS subscription status.

Unarchive contacts with the import tool

Use our import tool to bulk unarchive a large group of contacts in your audience. When you import contacts who were previously archived, we’ll automatically unarchive them back to your audience.

In some cases, archived contacts may not be imported with the email marketing or SMS subscription status you choose. For example, if someone unsubscribed from your emails before you archived them, you can't import them as subscribed. Make sure you always have permission before you add someone to your audience as a subscribed contact.