
Mailchimp changes definition of “audience” to include unsubscribed emails - tosh
https://twitter.com/Evanish/status/1128377802988892160
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nbrempel
I've been using Mailchimp for a while and I'm very confused with the software.
Lists changed to "Audience", and it seems they want me to segment my audience
using tags instead of having separate lists which just makes things more
confusing for me. I guess they are moving away from "email" software to more
general "marketing" software. Also the editor is surprisingly bad.

I'm planning on experimenting with
[https://www.mailerlite.com](https://www.mailerlite.com) to see if it's more
to-the-point.

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whymsicalburito
Having a single contact list that is segmented by tags and other criteria is
more standard in marketing platforms. I think you're right that this is part
of their migration to being a more full featured marketing solution.

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paulsutter
I’ve had unsubscribes go to the website within minutes, talk to a rep using
Drift, then eventually buy.

An unsubscribe means “no more email” it doesn’t necessarily mean no interest.
It’s important to track the whole funnel not just each campaign.

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d-sc
I unsubscribe anything that is not a person or relevant notification even if I
pay for a service. [flight itinerary w/ confirmation number = ok, Spotify
trending = not ok]. I suspect other people do as well.

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simongr3dal
In general you can turn off every notification option companies give you,
without fear, because they are more or less required by law to send you the
"transactional" (useful confirmations and notifications) emails.

At least that's my understanding.

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CamelCaseName
Not worth the risk, because you never know their implementation.

I once opted out of all emails from a crowd funding startup.

Turns out that "all" emails really means all. I couldn't reset my password.

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Wowfunhappy
> Turns out that "all" emails really means all. I couldn't reset my password.

I can understand there being a gray area around what is important information
and what is marketing, but not getting password reset emails is just a bug.
That never makes any sense and I highly doubt it was intentional.

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mxstbr
I moved my newsletter[0] from Mailchimp to Buttondown[1] and have been very
happy. The price is much cheaper, and Buttondown does exactly what I need it
to do: manage my list of subscribers and send emails reliably.

As the cherries on top I can compose my emails in markdown and their public
API is nice to use.

Highly recommended for personal newsletter needs!

[0]: [https://mxstbr.com/thoughts](https://mxstbr.com/thoughts)

[1]: [https://buttondown.email](https://buttondown.email)

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ukulele
I understand the cynicism, but for now at least this is not affecting pricing
(which is still based on subscribers [0]).

Seems like it's more about finding ways to target users who have unsubscribed
from a mailing list. That has its own thorns, but a sly price hike doesn't
appear to be one of them so far.

[0] [https://mailchimp.com/help/about-mailchimp-pricing-
plans](https://mailchimp.com/help/about-mailchimp-pricing-plans)

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joecot
I received an email to my free Mailchimp account explaining this change, which
included this:

> As a current user of our Forever Free plan, you'll now be in the new Free
> plan as long as your audience size is 2,000 contacts or less. The new
> pricing structure is based upon the total number of contacts you can market
> to, which now includes unsubscribes and customers who have simply not opted-
> in yet. You can check your Mailchimp account to see how many contacts are in
> your total audience. And keep in mind, you can always archive contacts you
> aren't using. On June 15, 2019, the pricing change will go into effect if
> you have more than 2,000 contacts.

So it sounds like it very much does change pricing on June 15th, at the least
meaning previously Free users will now have to pay, unless they go in and
manually archive unsubscribed emails.

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brndn
I got this email from them today:

> If you are a current free user You can remain a free user so long as you
> have 2,000 or fewer contacts in your audience, and you’ll now have the new
> free plan features. If the new way of counting contacts causes your audience
> to exceed 2,000 contacts before June 15, 2019, we’ll automatically archive
> your unsubscribed and transactional contacts. After June 15, we’ll begin
> calculating your audience as described in Section 7B of our TOU, but you can
> always manually archive contacts to keep your audience under 2,000 contacts.

So it sounds like they are actually automatically archiving unsubscribed
emails if it puts you over the limit.

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joecot
OK, that wasn't in the original "Exciting updates coming to your Mailchimp
account" email. That appears to be from today in the "Updates to your
Mailchimp account" email from Mailteam Legal. I'm guessing someone from legal
saw that original email and puckered a bit, and drafted this clarification.

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jeremymcanally
And billed this change as “exciting” for the user when they sent the
announcement email, which struck me as...tone deaf. If you’re doing something
I won’t like just tell me straight.

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jvagner
They announced a lot of things, and this was just one change in a slew of new
product expansions. Seemed reasonable to me.

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jeremymcanally
One paragraph of like six was about the new Marketing Platform they're
offering (the rest were about this change), which for free users like myself,
I'm pretty sure doesn't really warrant a lot of excitement. I realize I'm a
free user, but I use it for a small list of people. I really have zero use for
any of the new stuff they're offering. I'll probably just jump over to MadMimi
or something else similar since it seems their focus is moving more towards
multi-channel marketing and less on running a mailing list.

Speaking of: I'm confused by their push into "Marketing Software™" to be
honest. There are a lot of people doing that already, and all the MC users I
know (which, granted, is only a sample of say 20 people) don't use it in the
way they're trying to pivot towards. I'm guessing they'll shed a ton of
current users in this change up, but maybe they'll gain an equal or greater
number of folks looking for what they're offering? I guess we'll see.

~~~
jvagner
It's a pretty significant cost-calculation change, and thought the charge may
not land yet, it'll probably land later on. Also, a lot of people manage MC
accounts for clients, so this will be a head's up discussion in those
engagement discussions ("That tool we use for audience segmentation..? The
price calculation may be changing because they're now counting
unsubscribes..").

That said, to your second point: a lot of people just want simple, email list
management. And for that, MailChimp has gotten a little unwieldy. But in a
more sophisticated digital marketing strategy, some of their other components
make more sense. They're competing with the base CRMs out there, and they'd
rather not be one half of an equation where they'll eventually lose out
because customers need to move up the offering chain. And in remarketing and
attribution oriented campaigns, the new MC features make more sense, in
theory.

Lastly, many many many companies out there barely use their marketing tools.
If you think in terms of analytics, tracking, audience targeting, remarketing,
etc., a lot of people are just using the thinnest feature set to fake their
marketing. If you tie a few tools together, it gets a bit harder, so those MC
customers who are trying to level up a bit need to figure out an additional
element of integration. It's detail oriented and prone to error. By bundling
these together, they can help their customers level-up without confronting the
integration burden.

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creaghpatr
Someone commented a good point, you could just export your unsubscribe email
addresses and then delete them out, that's arguably a good practice.

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kennywinker
Such a good practice that the software should do it for you.

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creaghpatr
Sure but they would charge you for that service, isn't that the point? Hubspot
tells me which contacts I should avoid sending to, but I still have to pay to
have those contacts so they can tell me that.

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toasterlovin
The difference being that you're not sending emails to unsubscribed addresses,
so they don't really occupy the same conceptual space as subscribed addresses.

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SyneRyder
A couple of other things I've noticed while logging in today:

* Whatever the previous free tier limit was on mailing lists, I'm now getting a warning that "You can't add another Audience - If you’re ready to build another audience, you’ll need to upgrade your account." I currently have 3 lists/audiences that I think are grandfathered in, previously the limit seemed to be on total subscriber numbers across all lists, not the number of lists.

* I can't archive Cleaned addresses (ie email addresses that have been unsubscribed because they've been bouncing emails), so they're permanently in the Audience numbers even though you can't (and shouldn't!) market to them. I assume they need to be archived so the system knows "don't allow this email address to be resubscribed".

* Maybe this is a Firefox Windows bug, but if you've got only one person in your search/segment, and you try to select Actions -> Archive, on a standard Full HD monitor the Archive & Delete menu options are offscreen and you can't scroll the page down to click on them. Meanwhile options like "Resubscribe" (!) and Make VIP are visible. Zooming the page out to 80% works, but it just feels like one of those dark patterns, even if unintentional or a bug.

I'm definitely looking for alternatives now (recommendations welcome). Even if
these are all things I can work around, I don't like their overall trend. I
should have got the hint when Mailchimp started defaulting new lists to not
require a confirmed opt-in from subscribers...

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alentodorov
I believe it’s related to their recent-ish push into using Mailchimp as a
source for Facebook custom audience advertising.

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blat001
Yes, a common use case for a marketing platform is to retarget opted out users
as they have demonstrated some affinity for your brand.

Most likely just don't need to receive 2-3 emails a day from you

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hiroshi3110
Are there any newsletter or campaign mail service that automatically schedule
amount of mails so that they will not blocked? Say I'll going to send the
first volume of newsletter to 10K email address (not a cold mail, they are our
users).

