Delete an Audience

An audience is the primary location where your contacts are stored in Mailchimp. It's possible to delete an audience, but we don't recommend it because you might lose important data about your contacts.

In this article, you'll learn how to delete an audience, and the drawbacks of deleting an audience.

Before you start

Here are some things to know before you begin this process.

• If you've recently sent an email or published a webpage that’s connected to your audience, we'll temporarily stop you from deleting it. This helps ensure accurate delivery rates and gather the data seen in your reports. To learn more, check out Limits on Bulk Actions.
• To learn how to delete an audience on mobile, check out Manage Account Settings on Mobile.

Drawbacks of audience deletion

Before you delete your audience, keep these drawbacks in mind.

• Permanent audience data loss
  • If you delete an audience, you'll lose the audience history. This includes contact activity, unsubscribes, complaints, bounces, and export files.
  • You'll lose your contacts' email addresses.
  • Some audience-specific links and system merge tags, like unsubscribe links, will stop working.
  • Conversations won't be accessible after you delete an audience.
• Permanent reporting data loss
  • All campaigns associated with an audience will remain in your account.
  • Most of the statistics in your regular email, landing page, and automation reports will continue to update. However, the data for your website report will be removed.
• Abuse complaints
  • For each audience in your account, we keep track of bounced and unsubscribed addresses. We prevent them from being added again, so you don’t have to worry about sending to these contacts.
  • If you delete the audience, its bounce and unsubscribe information is lost.

If you need to delete your audience anyway, that's okay, but it's usually best to back up your account first.

Alternatives

There are a few options to audience deletion that keep your data intact without adding to your contact total.

• Auto-update your audience

  • Instead of deleting an audience and importing the same contacts to another one, perform an auto-update import to add new information for existing contacts. This way, you can maintain your existing audience, and keep all your audience-specific data intact.

• Maintain a single audience

  • If you manage more than one brand in your account, it makes sense to have multiple audiences.
  • If you manage a single business with more than one audience, use tags to manage a single audience without duplicating or losing important data.

Delete an audience

If you're certain you want to delete your audience, you can do so from the list of audiences in your account.

To delete an entire audience, follow these steps.

1. Click Audience.
2. If you have more than 1 audience, click the Audience drop-down, then select Manage audiences.
3. Check the box next to the audience you want to delete. Your audience will need to have at least 2 contacts before you can delete it.
4. Click Delete audience.
5. In the Delete pop-up modal, take a moment to read the information.
6. Type PERMANENTLY DELETE in all caps, then select Delete.

• If a website is connected to your audience, use the Select new audience for your website drop-down and choose a new audience.
• You’ll need to change the audience if a landing page is connected to the audience you plan to delete.