Archive or Unarchive Your Contacts

Archive contacts to remove them from your audience without losing any of their data. This is helpful if you have duplicate, outdated, or inactive contacts who haven't interacted with your marketing emails or text messages.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.

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, you remove them from the contact table and add them 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. However, you’ll keep all of their data, including identifiable information in email or SMS reports. You also won’t be billed for archived contacts.

You can unarchive a contact at any time, either from the contacts page 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, then click All contacts.
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.
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.

View archived contacts

To view your archived contacts, click the Manage audience drop-down on the Contacts page, then click View 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, then click All contacts.
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 Manage audience drop-down and choose View archived contacts.
4. Check the box next to each contact you want to unarchive, or use the drop-down next to Email Address.
5. Click Unarchive or Unarchive all.

Great work! Your unarchived contacts will be returned to your audience’s contact table 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 who were previously 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.