Mailchimp will then check to make sure you want to resubscribe the contact and when you do, will add them back to the audience as live.
Pretty simple.
…but what about those contacts who accidentally unsubscribed themselves?… or who are showing as cleaned but are actually a real email address?
Doable… but the process is a bit more involved
If the contact unsubscribed themselves or were marked as cleaned
OK, firstly, a disclaimer… when a contact unsubscribes… it usually means they don’t want your emails – so if you’re looking to get them back to a subscribed state, you need to be sure that they want to. Otherwise they’ll re-unsubscribe and complain – which is not good for you and not good for Mailchimp.
..the same goes for cleaned email addresses. A cleaned email means that Mailchimp has tried to send emails to the address, but it’s not accepting them, either because the address doesn’t exist or because it’s full and rejecting any received emails. So only reactivate an email address if you’re 100% sure it’s valid and wants your communication – otherwise you’ll have issues as outlined previously.
So how can you do it? How can you “reanimate the dead” in your email list?
Well, firstly, you can’t do it in bulk (otherwise there would be lots of unscrupulous people resubscribing unsubscribes to send more spam – not good!).
The only way to reanimate these contacts is one by one… and it requires the use of a Mailchimp created form.
Think about it… if someone who was unsubscribed or cleaned decided they wanted back in on your communication, they’d use a form to do so – and Mailchimp would be like “ok… so they’ve resubscribed via a form… so it must be them, we’ll reactivate them”.
…which means if you’re 100% certain they want to be added back as a subscriber (and we mean 100%, not “I’m sure they unsubscribed by mistake”), you can complete the form on their behalf.
The best form to do this with is the “hosted” form that Mailchimp gives everyone ‘out of the box’ for each audience.
You can find this form in the “other forms” section of your Mailchimp account (within the Forms section).
