Reconfirm Contacts

If your audience has a lot of subscribed contacts who haven't heard from you recently, you may want to make sure they still want your marketing email. Sending email to subscribed contacts with old or invalid emails can lead to high rates of bounces, spam complaints, and unsubscribes. Even if an address is still valid, a contact may make a spam complaint if they don't want to hear from you. We generally consider such email addresses stale.

Unsubscribing your contacts' stale email addresses and reconfirming your permission to send to them may help keep your audience healthy and your open rates high. If you want to offer those contacts a way to subscribe again, they can use your audience's signup forms.

In this article, you'll learn how to export and unsubscribe existing contacts, and how to reconfirm their interest in email marketing.

Before you start

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

• Keep in mind that email marketing laws vary by jurisdiction. You should check local requirements before sending any marketing or promotional emails.
• If your contacts are stored outside of Mailchimp, and you want to add them to a reconfirmed Mailchimp audience, you'll follow a slightly different process. Follow the steps in the Share your signup form article and let your contacts signup themselves.
• If permitted, you may want to send your subscribed contacts a reconfirmation message from your business's email client or service. This will help protect your sending reputation on Mailchimp. If you use Mailchimp to send your reconfirmation messages to unengaged contacts, the reconfirmation message itself may affect your sending reputation.

Export and unsubscribe

To reconfirm addresses, you'll export your audience, bulk unsubscribe the subscribed contacts, and send the unsubscribed contacts a link to your signup form.

Export

1. Click Audience, then click All contacts.
2. If you have more than 1 audience, click the Current audience drop-down and choose the one you want to work with.
3. Click Export audience.
4. When the export is ready, click Export as CSV.
   
5. Save the export file to your computer.

Your export file will include separate CSVs for each type of contact. For this process, you'll only work with the subscribed CSV.

Unsubscribe

Next, you'll unsubscribe the subscribed contacts you exported.

1. Click Audience, then click All contacts.
2. If you have more than 1 audience, click the Current audience drop-down and choose the one you want to work with.
3. Click the Manage audience drop-down and choose Unsubscribe email addresses.
4. Open your CSV export file of subscribed contacts and copy and paste their email addresses into the field.
5. Click Unsubscribe.

After the email addresses are unsubscribed from your email marketing, you'll send a reconfirmation message.

Get your signup form URL

In your reconfirmation message, you'll include a link to your signup form so that contacts can opt back into your email marketing. To find your signup form URL, follow these steps.

1. Click Audience, then click Audience dashboard.
2. If you have more than 1 audience, click the Current audience drop-down and choose the one you want to work with.
3. Click the Manage Audience drop-down and choose Signup forms.
4. Scroll to the Form builder tile, then click Manage forms.
5. Make any changes to your form, as needed.
6. Copy the URL from the Signup form URL field.
   

Send a reconfirmation message

Offer your unsubscribed contacts different opportunities to resubscribe and receive marketing email from you again, depending on what is permitted in your jurisdiction and that of your contacts. Set up a pop-up form on your website, or send them an email from a different service.

For example, if you wish to send an email to reconfirm your contacts' interest, you could send an email from your business's email client or service. Here's how to do this.

1. Copy the subscribed email addresses from your exported CSV file into the BCC field.
2. Craft a message that asks recipients to confirm their interest and resubscribe to your marketing email.
3. Include a link to your Mailchimp signup form in the body of the email.

Consider including an explanation of the types of email content you'll send to these contacts. Many users send links to past newsletters, or to a new sample newsletter, as well.

You're all set. As you send emails to these reconfirmed subscribers, you should see healthy engagement. To keep up with their information, include an update your preferences link to every email you send.