Use the Combine Audiences Tool

As a best practice, we recommend that you maintain only 1 primary audience in Mailchimp, and use tags and segments to organize and target your contacts. If you have multiple audiences, use our combine audiences tool to merge them together.

In this article, you'll learn how to use our combine audiences tool.

Before you start

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

• Audience actions are permanent, so we recommend that you backup and export your audiences before you combine them. A backup allows you to retain as much audience data as possible. However, some data can't be exported and will be lost. To learn more about what your backup export will and won't include, check out View or Export Your Contacts.
• The combine audiences tool doesn’t transfer group or tag data, email engagement metrics such as opens and clicks, member ratings, opt-in time stamps, signup sources, or GDPR permissions. For this reason, we recommend that you don't combine audiences that are GDPR-enabled.
• Only subscribed contacts will be moved over to the primary audience.
• After you use an audience, you’ll need to wait 7 days to combine audiences. To learn more, read Limits on Bulk Actions.
• If you've set up a welcome email classic automation or Customer Journey with a Signs up starting point for your primary audience, the combine audiences tool will trigger the automation for all contacts moved from the original audience. To combine audiences without triggering the automation, pause the automation, combine your audiences, then edit the workflow to manually remove the contacts from the old audience.

Combine audiences

After you've backed up your audiences and exported data you want to keep, you're ready to merge your audiences.

To combine your audiences, follow these steps.

1. Click Audience, then click All contacts.
2. Click the Settings tab.
3. Click the Manage audiences button.

4. Click the Manage audience drop-down next to the audience you want to combine with your primary audience, and choose Combine audiences.

   For example, if you have an audience called "New Customers," and you want to combine it with a primary audience called "Storefront Customers," you'll click the drop-down next to your "New Customers" audience.

5. In the Combine audiences pop-up modal, click the drop-down and choose your primary audience.

6. Click Next.
7. If you've set up groups to organize your primary audience, check the box next to the group(s) you want to add these contacts to. When you're done, click Next to continue to the confirmation page.
8. Take a moment to read the data notification and backup your audiences if you haven’t already. Remember that group and tag data, email engagement metrics such as opens and clicks, member ratings, opt-in time stamps, signup sources, and GDPR permissions will not transfer to the new audience, and that some data can't be backed up with an export. Data that can't be backed up with an export will be lost if you delete the audience.
9. Enter CONFIRM, then click Combine audiences.

Repeat this process for each of the audiences you want to combine.

Next steps

When you've finished backing up and combining your audiences, you can delete your old audiences.

Be sure to update any signup forms to match your new primary audience.