About Non-Subscribed Contacts

A non-subscribed contact is someone who's interacted with your brand but hasn’t opted in to receive marketing content. These contacts can be reached through other marketing channels, like order notifications or ads, and provide valuable data about your audience.

In this article, you’ll learn about non-subscribed contacts and how to use them.

About non-subscribed contacts

Your Mailchimp audience has several different types of contacts. A non-subscribed contact has provided you with their email address or phone number but hasn’t opted in to receive marketing content. For example, someone may provide their email address when they complete an online order or contact you with a question. If they aren’t presented with the option to subscribe to your email marketing, or if they choose not to subscribe, their email address is stored in your audience as non-subscribed.

Here are some common ways non-subscribed contacts are added to your Mailchimp audience.

• Through a connected online store
• Through an integration
• Using a manual import
• From an email forwarded to your Mailchimp Inbox

Use non-subscribed contacts

Non-subscribed contacts can receive transactional emails, which are one-time sends usually related to their account activity. Non-subscribed contacts can also receive ads. These contacts provide valuable data about who's interacting with your brand, and are important to growing and defining your target audience.

When you build your audience for Google remarketing ads, include non-subscribed contacts to increase your reach and help your ads perform better.

Your Mailchimp account includes transactional email options such as order notifications and abandoned cart emails. To learn more, check out About Transactional Emails.

Non-subscribed contacts, automation-based transactional emails, and SMS messaging is specific to your Mailchimp Marketing plan. If you’re looking for a more robust transactional email service, check out Mailchimp’s Transactional Email add-on.

View non-subscribed contacts

To view non-subscribed contacts, you'll create a segment of them in your audience.

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 Create new segment, then click Regular segment.
4. Set the drop-down menus to Email subscription status | is one of | Non-Subscribed.
5. Click Preview Segment.

When you preview the segment, you'll see only the non-subscribed contacts in your audience. To further refine your segment, click Edit segment. To save your segment of non-subscribed contacts, click Use segment. To save a copy of your segment, export it to a CSV.

Billing and non-subscribed contacts

Non-subscribed contacts are included in your contact total and count towards your monthly plan limit. This is because they provide valuable audience data and can be reached through various marketing channels. To learn more, check out About Mailchimp Pricing Plans.

If you only use your Mailchimp account for bulk email sending, you may find more value in archiving your segment of non-subscribed contacts. With a lower contact total, you might be able to downgrade to a lower pricing tier.