Requirements and Best Practices for Audiences

Your marketing will generate the highest return on investment (ROI) when you take the time to build and maintain a healthy audience. Mailchimp has built-in tools to help you along the way. We also have certain requirements all Mailchimp customers must follow, and recommend some best practices that can help keep your audience in good shape.

In this article, you'll learn about required and recommended best practices for audience collection and maintenance.

Requirements for audiences

As a marketing platform with millions of customers all over the world, we have an obligation to maintain a reliable service. This means we have requirements for your audience that you should be aware of in order to remain compliant with our Terms of Use.

Here are the most crucial requirements for your audience.

Don't use a third-party list

Third-party lists of email addresses or phone numbers are prohibited under our Terms of Use. This includes purchased or rented lists, and lists scraped from third-party sources, including public websites. Your audience should be collected entirely by you.

Get proper permission

You can store different contact types in your Mailchimp audience, including contacts who haven't signed up to receive specific marketing content. You're required to respect ‌permission levels for contacts in your audience. Take a look at this article on contact types to help you determine which marketing materials to distribute to different contacts.

Recommendations for your audience

Mailchimp has some built-in tools to help keep your audience compliant, but you should use best practices for audience collection and maintenance. Poor audience maintenance can result in low engagement, abuse complaints, and compliance issues. Depending on the situation, these issues can force us to shut down your account.

In addition to our requirements, follow these recommendations to optimize the health of your audience.

Use a primary audience

It's best to have one audience that you organize with tags, groups, or segments. Mailchimp treats each audience in your account separately, and billing is based on the total number of contacts across all your audiences (except with archived and cleaned contacts). If you have duplicate contacts across audiences, having 1 audience could save you money. One audience is also easier to manage and keep clean.

Maintain proper permission

For subscribed contacts, permission can go stale if you don't actively engage with them. If you have subscribed contacts you haven’t engaged with regularly, you may want to reconfirm your contacts. When you reconfirm your contacts, you’ll make sure they still want your marketing content. This will help reduce bounced emails and abuse complaints.

Re-engage or unsubscribe inactive subscribers

We strongly recommend that you periodically re-engage inactive subscribed contacts to confirm their interest in your business or product. If your inactive subscribed contacts don't respond to your re-engagement email, it's best to unsubscribe them.

Allow contacts to update their preferences

If you use Mailchimp for email marketing, include an update your preferences link in your emails. Your recipients can use the link to update their personal information and subscription preferences. If you use interest groups, your contacts can change groups from their profile.

Consider your opt-in method

You have the option to use single or double opt-in for your email marketing. Double opt-in requires people to confirm their signup via email before they’re added to your audience as subscribed contacts. Double opt-in helps ensure your subscribed contacts are interested in your business, and keeps invalid email addresses out of your audience.

Learn more about double opt-in for your email marketing.

Use reCAPTCHA subscribe confirmation

To prevent fake signups, we add a reCAPTCHA check to our hosted signup forms that spambots can't access.

You can enable reCAPTCHA in your audience settings when you use a landing page signup form blocks, embedded forms, or pop-up forms.