About Your Contacts

The people whose information you store in your Mailchimp account are known as your contacts. A person’s contact type determines which marketing materials they can receive, and whether they count toward your marketing plan's monthly contact limit.

In this article, you’ll learn more about the contact types in Mailchimp and where to view them.

Things to know

Here are some 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 could stop you from sending certain content, 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

We categorize contacts based on their marketing status. A contact can have one of the following statuses: subscribed, unsubscribed, non-subscribed, cleaned, or pending. Contacts can also be archived, which removes them from your marketing audience but keeps 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's opted in to receive your marketing content. Subscribed contacts 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 or SMS Marketing columns of the contact table.

Counts toward monthly plan limit?: Yes
Can receive: Ads, marketing emails, marketing text messages, and transactional emails such as order notifications

Marketing emails and SMS have separate subscription processes. A subscribed contact who’s opted in to receive email marketing would need to opt in for SMS marketing also.

Unsubscribed

An unsubscribed contact is someone who previously received your marketing content but has opted out. They’ll have an Unsubscribed badge in the Email Marketing or SMS Marketing columns of the contact table.

Counts toward monthly plan limit?: Yes
Can receive: Ads and transactional emails
Cannot receive: Marketing emails, marketing text messages

About Unsubscribes

Marketing emails and SMS have separate unsubscribe processes. A contact who’s opted in to both can unsubscribe from one and still receive content from the other source.

Non-subscribed

A non-subscribed contact is someone who's interacted with you but hasn’t opted in to receive marketing content. 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 or SMS Marketing columns of the contact table.

Counts toward monthly plan limit?: Yes
Can receive: Ads and transactional emails
Cannot receive: Marketing emails, marketing text messages

About Non-Subscribed Contacts

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

About Cleaned Contacts

Pending

A pending contact is someone who's 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 haven't 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

An archived contact is someone who’s been removed from your 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 email reports.

Counts toward monthly plan limit?: No
Can receive: Nothing

Archive or Unarchive Your Contacts

Deleted

A deleted contact is someone 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 subscribers that don’t interact with your marketing, you should choose to archive them. Delete contacts for General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) purposes only.

Counts toward monthly plan limit?: No
Can receive: Nothing

Delete Contacts

Sort your audience by contact type

To view subscribed, unsubscribed, non-subscribed, or cleaned contacts, you’ll use the Email Marketing and SMS Marketing columns in the contact table.

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. Locate the Email Marketing or SMS Marketing column in the contact table.
   
   This column displays badges to indicate each contact's type.
4. Click the arrow in the Email Marketing or SMS Marketing column to sort your audience by contact type.

You can also create and save a segment for each contact type based on email or SMS marketing status.

View archived contacts

Archived contacts are stored separately from other contacts in your audience. To view your archived 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.

We’ll display all of the archived contacts in your audience. Use this data to export all of your archived contacts, access their contact profile pages, or unarchive them as needed.

Archive or Unarchive Your Contacts