Archive or Unarchive Your Contacts

Archive contacts to remove them from your audience without losing any of their data. This is useful for duplicate, outdated, or inactive contacts who haven't interacted with your marketing emails or text messages. If you change your mind, you can unarchive them.

In this article, you’ll learn how to archive or unarchive your contacts in Mailchimp, including how to archive contacts within a segment.

Before you start

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

• For General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) purposes, archiving is not a legal substitute for deletion. If an EU contact asks to be removed from your account, you must permanently delete them from all audiences in which their data is stored. To learn how, check out Delete Contacts.
• If you have contacts who appear in more than 1 audience, you'll need to archive them from each audience.

About archiving

When you archive an email or SMS contact, they are removed from the contact table and added to a separate archived contacts table. You won't be able to edit an archived contact's profile or send them marketing emails or texts. Their data is preserved, including identifiable information in email or SMS reports. Archived contacts don't count toward your billing tier.

You can unarchive a contact at any time from the contacts table or with an import. A contact can also unarchive themselves if they sign up through your Mailchimp signup form or interact with your connected online store.

Archive your contacts

To archive 1 or more contacts, follow these steps.

1. Click Audience.
2. If you have more than 1 audience, click the Audience drop-down and choose the one you want to work with.
3. Check the box next to each contact you want to archive, or use the drop-down next to Email Address to Select all or Select visible contacts.
4. Click Archive.
5. In the Archive contacts pop-up modal, enter ARCHIVE and click Archive.

Nice job! We’ll display a success message that tells you how many contacts you've archived.

Archive contacts within a segment

To archive multiple contacts that meet specific criteria, create a segment, then follow these steps.

1. From the segment preview, check the box in the header to select all contacts in the segment.
2. If prompted to select all contacts beyond what's visible on screen, click Select all [X] contacts.
3. Click Actions, then click Archive.
4. In the pop-up, type ARCHIVE and click Archive.

A success message confirms how many contacts were archived. The process may take a few minutes for large contact lists.

View archived contacts

To view your archived contacts, click the More options drop-down on the Contacts page, then click Archived contacts.

Your archived contacts will appear in a single table. From here, you can export all of your archived contacts, access their contact profile pages, or unarchive them as needed.

Unarchive your contacts

When you unarchive a contact, they’ll be added to your audience with their most recent email marketing or SMS subscription status.

To unarchive 1 or more contacts, follow these steps.

1. Click Audience.
2. If you have more than 1 audience, click the Audience drop-down and choose the one you want to work with.
3. Click the More options drop-down and choose Archived contacts.
4. Check the box next to each contact you want to unarchive, or use the drop-down next to Email Address to Select all or Select visible contacts.
5. Click Unarchive or Unarchive all.
6. In the pop-up modal, enter UNARCHIVE and click Unarchive.

Great work! Your unarchived contacts will return to your audience with their most recent email marketing or SMS subscription status.

Unarchive contacts with the import tool

It's possible to use our import tool to add archived contacts back into your audience, but we don't recommend this method.

When you import contacts that are currently archived, we'll automatically unarchive them back to your audience. Keep in mind that in some cases, archived contacts may not be imported with the email marketing or SMS subscription status you choose. For example, if someone unsubscribed from your emails before you archived them, you can't import them as subscribed. Make sure you have permission before you add someone to your audience as a subscribed contact.

To learn more, check out Import Contacts to Mailchimp.