For “normal use, Mailchimp is free if you have up to 2,000 people in your audience and can live without certain features (some of which are REALLY useful).

However, if you’re in the position where you either need those features, or have more than 2,000 people in your audience, here are some ways to reduce or stop paying for the premium version of Mailchimp altogether.

Audience Size

The size of your audience is a big factor. If you’ve been using Mailchimp for a while or are very actively building your list, you might have learned the hard way that when you hit an audience of 2,000 you have to start paying for Mailchimp, which can be quite pricey. The bigger your audience, the more you have to pay.

Obviously none of us want to pay more than we need to, and there are a few things you can do to help contain your audience to below that 2,000 threshold or at least in a lower payment tier:

1. Deal with your unsubscribers

Very frustratingly with Mailchimp, by default that 2,000 threshold includes people who have actually unsubscribed from your list. This means that you can’t even email them but yet are paying for them to be there if they take you over 2,000. Quite naturally, most people assume that the 2,000 people limit is subscribers they are able to email, which just isn’t the case. I work with a LOT of clients to help them with Mailchimp and this is a very common issue.

Simply by archiving the unsubscribers you remove them from your audience. That could be the difference between you needing to pay or not, or between two (or even more) subscription fee bands.

2. Deal with your tumbleweeds

On top of your unsubscribers, you’ve probably got “tumbleweeds” in your audience too - i.e. people who are still subscribed and taking up some of your 2,000 spots, but never actually open your emails or engage with anything you do or send out. It might be that they used to but haven’t in say 6, 12 or 24 months. You be the judge of where the cut-off should be. One of the reasons could be that your emails are going into their spam folders so they just don’t see them any more. Check out my blog post about how to stop your emails going into spam for some help with that and try taking those steps before taking drastic action.

If it turns out that they are getting your emails but they’re genuinely not interested any more, why pay for them to be on your list?

By using segments you can identify who those people are and either take steps to revive their interest and/or archive them. Take care when creating your segments though as it can be easy to sweep up recent subscribers by accident within some of the parameters.

3. Deal with your “cleaned”

If a campaign (email) fails to reach a particular email address a few times, Mailchimp will clean them - this means that it will stop trying to send them anything but keep them in your audience. The most common reasons for that is because the person has either left a job and the email is no longer in use, or simply because there was a typo in their email address when they subscribed - it’s astonishing how many people type their own name wrong or put .con instead of .com. So have a look through the cleaned contacts and either amend them or archive them.

4. Deal with your “non-subscribed”

If you have your ecommerce site and Mailchimp synced (which I’d highly recommend doing because it gives you access to some really powerful features), then it’s very likely that you’ll have “non-subscribers” in your list. These are usually people who have bought something on your website but not ticked the box to say they want to sign up to your newsletter as part of the checkout process. They’ll still be added to your audience and count towards your total headcount, but you can only send them transaction-related emails (e.g. abandoned carts and follow-up purchase mail), and not marketing campaigns. There are two ways to deal with them:

a) create a follow-up purchase automation with a clear call to action to subscribe (with the benefits to them of doing so)

b) if this doesn’t produce the action, consider archiving them unless you plan to use Mailchimp’s transactional (abandoned cart etc) functionality. Since most ecommerce solutions include that you may not want to use Mailchimp’s version.

What impact did that have on your list size and costs?

If you use those three things in combination, how much have you reduced your audience size to? Has that saved you any money? Please let me know, I’d love to hear how it works for you.

PS before doing these things always take a back-up of your audience data just in case.

sneaky ways around some of the paid features

1. Automated sequences

On top of audience size, getting access to automation sequences is one of the most common reasons that people to pay. For example, within the free version Mailchimp will allow you to send a number of one-step automated emails e.g. welcome, happy birthday etc. But if you wanted to create a series of automations you’ll need to pay. This might be for example:

• a series of related emails for a 6 week educational programme which starts sending automatically when someone signs up, regardless of when that is

• a promotion sequence which starts sending automatically in the run up to the subscriber’s birthday or renewal date.

Sequence automations can be incredibly powerful and can be developed in all sorts of imaginative ways depending on your business or audience (let me know if you need help). And if you know how to, you can do them using the free version of Mailchimp using tags instead of having to pay for the premium version. It’s a little more complicated initially but once it’s set up, just gets on with it without you needing to do anything except hopefully reap the resulting sales.

2. Scheduling

Depending on when you signed up to Mailchimp, you may or may not have access to the scheduling tool - i.e. being able to prepare a campaign in advance and schedule it to send out on a specific date or time. As a big factor of campaign success is down to the time it arrives and fitting with your audience’s lifestyles, scheduling is a key tool.

If you have an older legacy account you may still have access to scheduling in the free version but if not and you have a newer account you’ll have to pay to access this feature, or you could do the following:

Create your campaign as a draft so that it’s all ready to go. Make sure you have the Mailchimp app installed on your phone, set yourself an alarm and when it’s the time you want it to send, pop into to app and send it at the click of a button - it takes 10 seconds.

And finally

I hope these tips give you some food for thought and save you some pounds. If you need any help then drop me a line. And don’t forget to scroll to the bottom of this page to sign up to my email newsletter to receive future tips in your inbox.