How to control marketing overheads as your revenue rises
Your email program has hit a huge milestone. You’ve outgrown basic sequences and embraced the power of automation. Email marketing has become a critical channel that generates steady revenue and valuable customer insights—all with a better ROI than most of your other channels.
With that success comes new complexities. The marketing tools that helped you get here were vital, but they’re getting expensive. Bigger lists mean higher pricing tiers and greater resource demands to manage your burgeoning segments and automations.
It’s worth taking a step back and reviewing the true value of your marketing tech stack. If marketing costs are beginning to outpace email revenue, it’s time to revisit your configuration and identify ways to tighten its efficiency. Depending on your platform, some simple adjustments can make all the difference.
Automate list management
Email list growth is critical for businesses, but it can also generate a lot of waste. Many people will engage momentarily, but never turn into truly engaged customers. If you're not on top of your list management, these unengaged contacts can become a significant cost burden.
You need to create automations that archive unresponsive customers who fail to meet your engagement benchmarks.
Use smart filters
Hygiene or sunset automations should, at a minimum, filter contacts based on campaign activity, such as "did not open any campaign," or "did not click any campaign." You might also filter on the basis of shopping activity, sunsetting customers who have not viewed or purchased any products.
The more filters you include, the better your chances of excluding only those customers who are really not engaged. You need to be sure that customers who are slow to respond are not eliminated before they've had a chance to reconnect with you.
You can do this by using AND between each filter to make sure the exclusion only applies to contacts who meet all the criteria. Note that if you use OR instead of AND, you could include someone who only meets some, or even one, of your criteria.
Mailchimp’s Advanced Segment Builder *
Time them out
Date filters are a good way to scrub contacts who have been on file and inactive for a defined period of time. You can also filter out people who have not engaged in any marketing or shopping activity after a certain period.
Frequency filters are important, helping to confirm that the contacts you’re archiving have, in fact, received emails that they’ve ignored. You don't want to exclude someone that you have not asked to engage.
Give them a chance
Once you’ve confirmed your filter criteria, add the steps for what the automation should do with the contacts. A common best practice is to send a final re-engagement or winback email, with a time delay for them to respond. If they don't respond within a few days or a week, then remove them.
You can take different approaches for different levels of engagement. You might have a final automation, with no opportunity to re-engage, for contacts who have never engaged with your brand. Conversely, one-time purchasers might get one more opportunity to engage before you exclude them.
It's easier (and less expensive) to win back a lapsed buyer than it is to win a completely new customer.
Avoid overage
A key benefit Mailchimp offers is the ability to archive contacts directly in an automation. This means that as soon as a contact meets the criteria you set up, they will be automatically archived and removed from your total billable contacts. Archived contacts and any associated data remain viewable in Mailchimp, but don’t cost you anything to store.
Other platforms only allow you to create a new segment for these unengaged contacts that you still have to suppress manually. You may also have to suppress that segment again every time new contacts are added to it.
Smart management of your contact list, with hygiene automations to help reduce waste, means you can avoid overage fees.
Whenever you acquire new contacts, you get closer to exceeding the limits of your current plan—even if those contacts never become customers. So you have to choose between moving up a tier and paying for more than you might need, or deleting valuable prospect records. At best, you might find yourself paying a punitive overage fee because your campaign generated more responses than you expected.
Mailchimp takes a linear approach to growth. It offers a pay-as-you go overage structure that ensures your marketing costs are predictable and manageable. The idea is to make sure you reap the rewards of your success, not just your service provider. For example, you can save up to 42% when you switch from the Klaviyo Email Plan to the Mailchimp Standard plan. *
Plan for the future
If your tech stack seems to be working well enough, why risk changing it? The answer is clear: It may not be working as efficiently as it could. And as your business grows, underlying costs don't always scale in line with the value your marketing delivers.
Taking the time to review your automation settings and overall list health is a good step toward sustainable growth. This is more than routine housekeeping—it’s a critical strategic issue, the lifeblood and nerve center of your business. As Mailchimp’s report, The Art of the Opt-In, shows, marketers with high-quality email lists are 3 times more likely to have fully automated email marketing.
As you contemplate the next phase of your growth, you need a marketing technology partner that can support you and make your success the priority.
Mailchimp is a pioneer and innovator of marketing technology for growing businesses. Our plans align with every stage of your company's evolution, with pricing that scales to your usage and expert support to help you maximize your investment.
We’ve never seen marketing automation as an operational function. It’s a strategic commitment to building great customer relationships profitably. It’s not too late for you to start thinking the same way.
Next steps
Still not sure Mailchimp can make your marketing automation flow more smoothly? Download the Automated vs. Manual List Hygiene Comparison to see how we stack up against Klaviyo.
Automated vs. Manual List Hygiene
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*Disclaimers
- Marketing Automation Flows are available on paid plans. Features and Functionality vary by plan type. For details, please view Mailchimp’s various plans and pricing. Screen images simulated. Sequences shortened.
- Comparison based on email plan features and prices listed on Klaviyo.com as of 11/17/2025 at 100,000 active profiles, and Mailchimp Standard plan at 100,000 contacts. Availability of features and functionality varies by plan, which are subject to change.