How to clean a Mailchimp audience

To clean a Mailchimp audience, export its subscribed contacts, verify the export, and act on each result inside Mailchimp: archive the addresses whose action is remove, tag the uncertain ones, and leave the rest alone. Mailchimp already removes addresses that hard bounce or keep soft bouncing, but only after you have sent to them. Verification finds those addresses before the next campaign does. The step that needs most care is the way back: an import can unarchive contacts and can never bring back deleted ones, so plan your choices before you click.

What Mailchimp already does with bounces

Mailchimp sorts bounces into two kinds (Mailchimp: Soft vs. hard bounces):

• Hard bounce: a permanent reason the message cannot be delivered. In most cases Mailchimp cleans the address automatically and at once.
• Soft bounce: a temporary delivery problem. Mailchimp allows 7 soft bounces for an address with no subscriber activity, and up to 15 for a contact with earlier activity, before it treats the address as a hard bounce.

Either way the contact becomes cleaned. According to Mailchimp: About cleaned contacts, a cleaned address is treated as invalid, gets none of your future emails, cannot be edited, and is not charged for. To see them, create a segment with the conditions "Email subscription status", "is one of", "Cleaned" (Audience, then Segments, then Create segment).

This is useful, but it works after the fact: each cleaned address was a bounce on one of your sends, and a soft bouncing address can stay in your sends for many campaigns before it is cleaned. Every one of them counts in your bounce rate (bounce rate benchmarks).

Step 1: Export the audience

Mailchimp's view or export contacts article gives the steps:

1. Click Audience, and pick the audience if you have more than one.
2. Click Export audience, then Export CSV in the pop-up.
3. Wait for the email that says the export is ready, then download it.

Only Owners and Admins can export. The download can be a ZIP with one CSV per contact type, and archived contacts are exported separately from active ones. Keep the file: you will match results back to it, and Mailchimp keeps exports in Export history for 30 days.

Verify only the subscribed contacts. Cleaned contacts are already excluded from every send, and unsubscribed contacts get no marketing mail, so checking them spends credits without changing anything.

Step 2: Verify the export

Upload the subscribed CSV as a bulk list. You do not need to tidy the file first: pick the column that holds the addresses, see the cost, and start. Duplicates, malformed addresses and unknown results cost nothing.

When the list is done, download the results with your original columns plus ours. Three of ours matter here:

• ev_status: one of valid, invalid, catch_all, unknown or disposable;
• ev_reason: why, for example no_mailbox;
• ev_action: what to do: send, send_with_caution, remove or retry_later (actions).

Sort or filter by ev_action, not by status. Spam traps and frequent complainers are valid, because their mailbox accepts mail, yet their action is remove (see spam traps).

Step 3: Act on the results in Mailchimp

Archive, unsubscribe or delete

Mailchimp offers three ways to take a contact out of your sends, and they differ in billing and in what happens later (Mailchimp: About your contacts):

Archive is the option Mailchimp calls useful for outdated or inactive contacts. Archived contacts move to a separate table with their data kept, and they cannot be edited or mailed (Mailchimp: Archive or unarchive contacts). Billing follows your peak contact total in each billing period, so archiving lowers future periods, not one whose peak is already recorded (Mailchimp: Archive inactive contacts). Archiving cleaned contacts changes nothing for billing, since cleaned contacts are not counted anyway.

Unsubscribe keeps the contact in your audience and on your contact count. Its advantage is that a later import skips addresses stored as unsubscribed, so a later import cannot quietly bring them back (Mailchimp: Import contacts). The bulk tool is under More options, then Unsubscribe emails, and takes up to 3,000 pasted addresses at a time; contacts you unsubscribe this way get no confirmation or unsubscribe message (Mailchimp: Unsubscribe people from your marketing).

Delete is permanent. Mailchimp's delete contacts article says to delete for GDPR purposes only, asks you to confirm that the contacts can never be re-imported, and anonymizes their data in reports.

A practical rule: archive the remove rows by default. Unsubscribe them instead if your audience is refilled by imports or a connected app that might send the same addresses back. Delete only to honor an erasure request.

To archive a group at once, tag the rows first (next step), build a segment on that tag, select all its contacts, then click Actions, Archive, and type ARCHIVE to confirm. A contact in several audiences has to be archived in each one.

Tag the uncertain addresses

Tags are labels for your own organization of the audience (Mailchimp: Getting started with tags). The quickest way to tag many contacts is an import that applies one tag to everyone in the file:

1. From the results, make one CSV per group, with only the address column: for example the send_with_caution rows, the retry_later rows and the remove rows.
2. In Mailchimp, choose Audience, the Add contacts drop-down, Import contacts, then Upload a file.
3. Check Update any existing contacts, and add one tag for the file, such as "EV caution".
4. Match only the Email Address column. Blank cells in matched columns overwrite existing data, and unmatched columns are not imported.
5. Finish the import. Imports do not change the marketing status of contacts already in the audience.

Build these files only from the export of active, subscribed contacts. Importing an archived address unarchives it, and it returns with its most recent subscription status.

With the tags in place, a segment on "EV caution" holds your catch-all addresses and the other send_with_caution results: send them your most wanted content and watch their bounces and complaints. A segment on "EV retry" holds the unknown results. Exclude both from large campaigns until you have looked at them.

Fix typos with consent

An invalid row with the reason likely_typo may come with an ev_did_you_mean suggestion. Do not import the corrected address as subscribed on your own. Mailchimp's cleaned contacts article says to add a corrected address as a new contact and to be sure the person gave you permission; the safest way to get that is to ask them, for example through your signup form. More in email typos.

Step 4: Re-import safely

Mailchimp's import rules protect you here, as long as you do not work around them (Mailchimp: Import contacts):

• An import skips duplicate, bounced and unsubscribed addresses that are already in the audience.
• Contacts you import as subscribed skip the signup process, so you must already have permission to market to them.
• Do not try to resubscribe people who unsubscribed themselves. Mailchimp lets you resubscribe only contacts you unsubscribed manually; the others have to sign up again through your form (Mailchimp: Resubscribe a contact).
• Leave cleaned contacts cleaned. A fresh valid result months later does not undo a bounce Mailchimp recorded.

For a new list from outside Mailchimp, verify the file before you import it, not after the first campaign has found the bad addresses for you. And never verify a bought or scraped list to make it usable: verification shows whether mail can arrive, not whether anyone agreed to get it (bought email lists).

How often to clean

People change jobs and abandon mailboxes, so a list decays even when nobody joins. A rhythm that fits most senders, from our list cleaning guide:

• verify new contacts as they arrive, at signup or before each import;
• verify the whole audience before a large or unusual send;
• verify any segment you have not mailed for a few months before you mail it again;
• run the retry_later group again a few days after each check.

A deliverable address can still never open your mail. For those, Mailchimp suggests a re-engagement campaign before you archive them; see our re-engagement and sunset policy guide.

Questions

Does archiving contacts lower my Mailchimp bill?

Archived contacts do not count toward your contact limit, but Mailchimp bills on the peak contact total of each billing period. Archiving lowers future periods, not one whose peak is already recorded.

Should I verify cleaned contacts?

No. Mailchimp already excludes cleaned contacts from every future send and does not charge for them, so a check would only spend credits.

Can I resubscribe a contact that verification says is valid?

Only if you unsubscribed that contact yourself. People who unsubscribed themselves must sign up again through your form, and a result about the mailbox says nothing about their consent.

Try it

Upload your Mailchimp export for bulk email verification, or try a single address in the free email checker.

Related

• Bulk lists: preparing the file and the result columns.
• Statuses, reasons and actions.
• The catch_all status and the unknown status.
• Glossary: hard bounce and soft bounce.

Related guides

• How to clean an email list
• How to clean HubSpot contacts
• Cleaning an email list in Klaviyo
• Re-engagement campaigns and sunset policies
• Catch-all emails explained
• All guides

Sources

• Mailchimp: Soft vs. hard bounces: bounce kinds and the 7 and 15 soft bounce thresholds.
• Mailchimp: About cleaned contacts: what cleaned means, billing, the cleaned segment, corrected addresses.
• Mailchimp: About your contacts: statuses and which count toward the contact limit.
• Mailchimp: View or export contacts: export steps, file format, export history.
• Mailchimp: Archive or unarchive contacts: archiving steps, unarchiving by import.
• Mailchimp: Archive inactive contacts: peak contact billing, re-engagement first.
• Mailchimp: Unsubscribe people from your marketing: bulk unsubscribe tool and its limit.
• Mailchimp: Delete contacts: permanent deletion, GDPR only, no re-import.
• Mailchimp: Import contacts: import steps, tags, update existing contacts, skipped addresses, permission.
• Mailchimp: Resubscribe a contact: who can be resubscribed.
• Mailchimp: Getting started with tags: what tags are, bulk tagging.

How we wrote this: drafted by the email-validation.org team with the help of AI writing tools, from our product documentation and the sources linked in the text.