Mailchimp changes definition of “audience” to include unsubscribed emails

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.

Take eBay, for instance. For certain orders (and not others), I have begun to receive emails for each of the following:

• Order confirmation

• Preparing for shipment

• Shipped

• Will be delivered today

• Actually delivered.

This is useless noise. Fine to provide the option, but damn it, I've already opted out from as many messages as possible. The only email that should be "required" is order confirmation, and maybe one additional email for when the item has shipped.

> 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.

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.

They realized they were well suited as they store much of the audience data and logic for that sort of automation. Then they just need to connect to other platforms which is relatively easy integration.

This in turn gets them more lock in with features and data. Exporting all that data and logic is a major headache. I know because I've dealt with such a migration twice now.

Since there's still valuable data about unsubscribed users if they are wired up to your DB, and since you could presumably still retarget them with audience lists in other channels that aren't impacted, I understand this move.

Likewise, their pricing change from auto changing your pricing tier to having you forecast is fairly standard for large email platforms, but frankly a little customer hostile imho. It shifts the risk from them to you to know your volume. Sure if you want true pay as you go, you can use the underlying mailer tools (Amazon SES, Sparkpost, etc) but business users will struggle with that.