Requirements and Best Practices for Audiences

Your marketing will generate the highest return on investment (ROI) when you take the time to build and maintain a healthy audience. Mailchimp has built-in tools to help you along the way. We also have certain requirements all Mailchimp users must follow, and recommend some best practices that can help keep your audience in good shape.

In this article, you'll learn about required and recommended best practices for audience collection and maintenance.

Requirements for audiences

As a marketing platform with millions of users all over the world, we have an obligation to maintain a reliable service. This means we have requirements for your audience that you should be aware of in order to remain compliant with our Terms of Use.

Here are the most crucial requirements for your audience.

Don't use a third-party list

Third-party lists of email addresses are prohibited under our Terms of Use. This includes purchased or rented lists, and lists scraped from third-party sources including public websites. Your audience should be collected entirely by you.

Get proper permission

You can store different contact types in your Mailchimp audience, including contacts who haven't signed up to receive email marketing content. You're required to respect the permission levels for contacts on your audience. Take a look at this article on contact types to help you determine which marketing materials to distribute to different contacts.

Recommendations for your audience

Mailchimp has some built-in tools to help keep your audience clean, but you should exercise best practices for audience collection and maintenance. Poor audience maintenance can result in low engagement, abuse complaints, and compliance issues. Depending on the situation, these issues can force us to shut down your account.

In addition to our requirements, follow these recommendations to optimize the health of your audience.

Use a primary audience

If you can, it's best to have one audience that you organize with tags, groups, or segments, rather than maintain multiple audiences in your account. Mailchimp treats all the audiences in your account separately, and billing is based on the total number of contacts across all your audiences (with the exception of archived and cleaned contacts). If you have duplicate contacts across audiences, having one audience could save you money. One audience is also easier to manage and keep clean.

Maintain proper permission

For subscribed contacts, permission can go stale if you don't actively engage with them. If you have subscribers you haven’t engaged with regularly, you may want to reconfirm your contacts to make sure they still want your marketing email. This will help reduce bounced emails and abuse complaints.

Re-engage or unsubscribe inactive subscribers

We strongly recommend that you periodically re-engage inactive subscribed contacts to confirm their interest in your business or product. If your inactive subscribers don't respond to your re-engagement campaign, it's best to unsubscribe them.

Allow contacts to update their profiles

If you use Mailchimp for email marketing, include an update profile link in your email campaigns so your recipients can update their personal information and subscription preferences. If you use interest groups, your contacts can change groups from their profile.

Consider your opt-in method

You have the option to use a single or double opt-in method for your email marketing. Double opt-in requires people to confirm their signup via email before they’re added to your audience as subscribed contacts. Double opt-in can help ensure your subscribed contacts are interested in your business, and keeps invalid email addresses out of your audience.

Learn more about double opt-in for your email marketing.

Use reCAPTCHA subscribe confirmation

To prevent fake signups, we add a special reCAPTCHA check to our hosted signup forms that spambots can't access.

If you use landing page signup form blocks, or embedded or pop-up forms, you can enable reCAPTCHA in your audience settings.