Delete an Audience

It's possible to delete an audience in Mailchimp, but we don't always recommend it since you might lose important data about your contacts.

In this article, you'll learn about the drawbacks of audience deletion, and how to delete an audience if you need to.

Before you start

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

• If you've recently sent an email or published a webpage connected to your audience, we'll temporarily prevent you from deleting it. This helps us ensure proper delivery and gather important data for your reports. To learn more, check out Limits on Bulk Actions.

Drawbacks of audience deletion

Before you delete your audience, keep these drawbacks in mind.

• Permanent audience data loss
  If you delete an audience, you'll lose the audience history, including contact activity, unsubscribes, complaints, bounces, and export files. You'll also lose your contacts' email addresses. Some audience-specific links and system tags, like unsubscribe links, will stop working. Conversations will no longer be accessible after you delete an audience.
• Permanent reporting data loss
  All campaigns associated with an audience will remain in your account. Most of the statistics in your regular email, landing page, and automation reports will continue to update. However, the data for your website report will be removed.
• Possible abuse complaints
  For each audience in your account, we keep track of bounced and unsubscribed addresses and prevent them from being added back to your audience. If you delete the audience, its bounce and unsubscribe information is lost.

If you need to delete your audience anyway, that's okay, but it's almost always best to back up your account first.

Back Up Account Data

Alternative options

There are a few alternatives to audience deletion that keep your data intact without adding to your contact count.

• Auto-update your audience
  Instead of deleting an audience and importing the same contacts to another audience, perform an auto-update import to add new information for existing contacts. This way, you maintain and update your existing audience, and keep all your audience-specific data, unsubscribes, and cleaned addresses intact.

  How to Auto-Update an Existing Audience

• Maintain a single audience
  If you manage more than one brand in your account, it makes sense to manage multiple audiences. But if you manage a single business with different audiences, you can use tags and other tools to manage a single audience without duplicating or losing valuable data.

  Getting Started with Tags

How to delete an audience

Sometimes, you may decide it's necessary to completely delete an audience. If you're certain you want to permanently delete your audience, you can do so from the list of audiences in your account.

To delete an entire audience, follow these steps.

1. Click Audience, then click All contacts.
2. Click the Settings tab.
3. Click the Manage audiences button.
4. Check the box next to the audience you want to delete. Your audience will need to have at least 2 contacts before you can delete it.
5. Click Delete audience.
   
6. In the Delete pop-up modal, take a moment to read the information. When you’re ready, enter PERMANENTLY DELETE in all caps, then select Delete.