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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.

Found this useful? Please share:

Related

  • How to Resubscribe Someone in Mailchimp
  • Why You Should Not Use the Mailchimp Preferences Center
  • What does ‘cleaned’ mean in Mailchimp?

Filed Under: Marketing

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Comments

  1. Chris Wachsmuth says

    June 3, 2018 at 9:22 am

    Hi 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

    Reply
    • Gary says

      June 3, 2018 at 9:49 am

      Hi 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: https://organicweb.com.au/24075/email-marketing/mailchimp-automatic-unsubcribe/

      Reply
  2. Mary says

    May 1, 2019 at 7:15 pm

    This 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!

    Reply
    • Gary says

      May 1, 2019 at 7:34 pm

      Hi Mary,
      Please see https://mailchimp.com/help/set-up-custom-domain-authentication-dkim-and-spf/

      Reply
  3. Federick Gicain says

    April 13, 2020 at 9:17 pm

    How to get or export auto unsubscrided?

    Reply
    • Gary says

      April 15, 2020 at 12:42 pm

      Frederick, Mailchimp doesn’t know whether a subscriber has been auto or manually unsubscribed so there is no direct means of Mailchimp of determining who has been auto-unsubscribed. What you can do is create a segment where the “email marketing” status is unsubscribed and then choose an updated date where you believe that an auto-update may have occurred. You’ll then be able to export the segment.

      Reply
  4. Carla says

    June 14, 2020 at 1:22 am

    Gary, I moved to Mailchimp to communicate with our church about 200 people. I was sending church communications from our A******@gmail.com address, however, as groups became larger, messages started coming back viewed as spam. For the most part Mailchimp has worked for us. The FROM email address is still A******@gmail.com in using Mailchimp. Since Pandemic, I send out a weekly emails of a graphic with a data link to our online livestream, our Zoom Links for studies, etc. They click that link on Sunday mornings and go right to screen to view our live services. I did receive about 5 people who were unsubscribed automatically. I sent them a resubscribe and they did everything was OK for awhile and today when I went in the same 5 people were automatically unsubscribed again. After reading the article, Whitelisting is certainly not an option. I even looked at them to see if there was a pattern but was gmail, yahoo, aol and verizon. Any other suggestions?

    Reply
    • Gary says

      June 14, 2020 at 12:28 pm

      Hi Carla,
      My recommendations are:

      1. Use a paid-for domain for sending: Using a free email address (e.g. Gmail) as the sending email address is known to result in lower delivery rates.
      2. Once you’re using your paid domain for sending then Authenticate your domain:
      3. Doing both of the above will almost certainly reduce spam rates and unsubscribes.

      Reply

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