How to lower your Mailchimp bill without losing subscribers
Mailchimp bills by contacts, including many you can't or won't email. Five changes that shrink the count, and the bill, without losing anyone who still reads.
Most Mailchimp bills are bigger than they need to be for one reason: the plan is priced by contacts, and the contact count includes a lot of people you're not really mailing. The fix isn't a cheaper plan. It's a smaller, honest count.
1. Know what Mailchimp counts
Your count includes subscribed contacts, but also unsubscribed ones and non-subscribed ones (contacts synced in by a store or integration without opting in). Only cleaned contacts, the hard bounces, drop out on their own. Everyone else stays on the bill until you act.
2. Archive the people who stopped reading
Contacts who haven't clicked or bought in a year are paid for every month and give nothing back. Archive them: they stop counting, they keep their history, and they come back automatically if they sign up or buy again. Use clicks and purchases to decide, not opens alone, since some email apps open every message automatically.
3. Clear out unsubscribed and non-subscribed contacts
You can't send campaigns to people who unsubscribed, and most non-subscribed contacts never asked for your email. They still count. Archiving them is often the biggest single saving on a store-connected account.
4. Stop paying twice for the same person
Mailchimp counts a contact once per audience. The same email in three audiences is three contacts on your bill. Keep the most active copy and archive the rest, or merge audiences and use tags and segments instead.
5. Watch the tier line, every month
Plans come in contact tiers, and crossing the top of one moves the whole account up. A list grows and decays every week, so a one-off cleanup is back where it started within months. A monthly routine keeps you under the line you're aiming for.
What you don't lose
Done this way, nobody who still reads is removed: new subscribers get time to settle in, buyers and VIPs are protected, and anything archived can be restored. The only thing that drops is the part of the bill that paid for silence.
Want the real number for your account? Run a free audit, or try the Mailchimp cost calculator for a quick estimate.
Keep reading
How to clean up your Mailchimp audience, step by stepA practical checklist to clean a Mailchimp list: back it up, clear unsubscribed and duplicate contacts, archive the inactive ones safely, and keep it clean every month.Ruth Williams · 
How to archive contacts in Mailchimp, including in bulkStep by step: archive one contact, a whole group or every unsubscribed contact in Mailchimp, find them later, bring them back, and do it through the API.Ruth Williams ·