Why Mailchimp contacts are being automatically unsubscribed

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.