Are your subscribers being unsubscribed automatically i.e. without the contact clicking the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the campaign? Unfortunately all email marketing services fall victim to this rare issue.
How subscribers are unsubscribed automatically
To comply with legal requirements, Mailchimp and other email marketing services include unsubscribe links in the footer of each message. The reason that people are unsubscribed without their knowledge is due to certain spam filters; some spam filters click all links in a message to check that the none of the links contain malware. An issue is that these spam filters even click the unsubscribe link in messages.
Your subscribers may even see an ‘unsubscribe successful’ message from the email marketing service and then will receive the email campaign from you. In this case the spam filter has deemed your message to be safe and so has sent the message to the subscriber but had clicked the unsubscribe link before delivering the campaign to the contact.
What to do to avoid automatic unsubscribes
The best ways to avoid your email being thoroughly checked by spam filters is as follows:
- Add SPF and DMARC records for your email service provider as DNS records.
- Don’t include too much text on your images.
- Ensure that you retain a good domain quality (i.e. don’t have your messages marked as spam).
- Ask your recipients to whitelist your senders IP addresses (this is difficult to get your subscribers to do).
It can be perplexing when confronted with subscribers that have been unsubscribed without their knowledge. The above sheds light on why this happens and how to minimise the chance of this happening.
Chris Wachsmuth says
June 3, 2018 at 9:22 amHi Gary – found your article when I was googling up the problem we just had in the past 2 weeks with a 350+ UNSUBSCRIBE rate via M/C for an email campaign for a small artist studio I work for. this is the second time in 16 months this happened to us although the first time UNSUBSCRIBED only 50 people. We have really gotten no good answers from M/C as to why this happened except that we are not using a PAID email FROM address [we use icloud]. The other weird thing about this UNSUBSCRIBE event was that we showed over 5500 CLICKS on links in the email we sent out. this has never happened before. some articles say that too many links and images will get the CLICK rate way up which then becomes a SPAM alert yielding the mass UNSUBSCRIBES. We are on a FREE account with m/c [under 2000 folks on our list] – so we have lost not only the 350+ but there are an additional 200 names missing from our list which M/C also cannot explain.
Do you have any insight into why this happened and what we can do about it to prevent this from happening in the future ? We’ve had just marginal success [30%] in recovering our folks.
Thanks in advance
Chris in SF
for Jacqueline Sullivan Designs
Gary says
June 3, 2018 at 9:49 amHi Chris,
In my experience, where you’ve had an unexpectedly large number of unsubscribes, especially combined with a high click rate, it’s usually due to a spam filter that is ‘ clicking’ all links in an email campaign. Please see this article: http://organicweb.com.au/24075/email-marketing/mailchimp-automatic-unsubcribe/
Mary says
May 1, 2019 at 7:15 pmThis was a helpful article, but can you explain what this sentence means? “Add SPF and DMARC records for your email service provider as DNS records.”? Thank you!
Gary says
May 1, 2019 at 7:34 pmHi Mary,
Please see https://mailchimp.com/help/set-up-custom-domain-authentication-dkim-and-spf/