If your subscribers mark your Mailchimp campaigns as spam then your Mailchimp account will be suspended or disabled. If your hard bounce rates are high then Mailchimp will disable list importing and other single opt-in methods.
What does disabling single opt-in mean?
The message as below doesn’t mean that Mailchimp have disabled your account or are stopping you from sending email marketing. Rather, they are, per the warning message, disabling single sign-on sources and forcing double opt-in for all new subscribers. Your existing subscribers in your lists remain as they are however any new subscribers will need to double opt-in. This does mean that importing from Excel and other sources has been disabled.
All single opt-in methods, including via the API and list import, have been disabled for your account.
Going forward, please use our double opt-in method to add subscribers to your list.
There is no simple way to get around the double opt-in of subscribers. The best thing to do is exactly what Mailchimp states in that new subscribers need to double opt-in (i.e. your new subscribers will receive a confirmation email which in which is a hyperlink that they’ll need to click to verify that they do want to be subscribed to your list). This is frustrating but it’s likely that Mailchimp will remove the restriction after awhile.
How do I avoid getting single opt-in disabled?
In Mailchimp classes almost every participant that attends training has a requirement to import subscribers in bulk usually from Microsoft Excel. The disabling of single opt-in means that this import can’t be performed.
The simplest means of ensuring that your hard-bounce rates remain low is to initially only import email addresses that you’ve either recently added to your list or that you’ve recently successfully sent an email to.
On an ongoing basis it’s important to send campaigns to your subscribers regularly as this reduced the chances of suddenly having a large number of hard-bounces.
Why does Mailchimp care about hard-bounces?
Ultimately Mailchimp is just trying to be certain that your subscribers have agreed to receive your EDM. Mailchimp have an interest in ensuring that all necessary spam laws are being adhered to. Hard-bounces are an indication that you have an old list of subscribers (subscribers may no longer remember that they subscribed and mark your email campaigns as spam) or that you’ve purchased a list of email addresses which is a breach of the Mailchimp terms of use.
Has anyone ever had this happen to them, and how long did you have to wait for the restriction to be taken off?
Hi, my account is restricted right now, can anyone knows for how long this would last? I import a csv file and all the emails had an error and I had a biiiig bounce rate.
The restriction never comes off. It’s permanent. I’ve contact mailchimp — no empathy there.
So, I have 90 new emails to add to one of my lists. I’m happy to do the double opt-in thing with them, but how do I do it? Previously I just uploaded my spreadsheet of the 90 new people. What do I do now?
Hello, I had list import feature deactivated following a hard bounce rate. Then, after a dozen emails sent to my list, the feature was made avalaibe again.
The best is to send good emails to a list that wants it.
Hi, Jose,
Can you tell me how many emails you have sent for this feature to be reactivated and what is the open rate and click rate for the feature to be reactivated?
Hope you can share some details.
I imported what I believed to be a clean list via Excel only to have a high bounce rate and have the email address import facility removed.
For now, I have exported the list to CSV, purged the list of “bad” entries (most of them are, in fact good) and am sending EDM using a 100% “clean” Mailchimp list and the same EDM in blocks of 75 every 15 minutes using Outlook BCC from a deduplicated Excel workbook.
I trust that, in due course, once Mailchimp is happy that my list is clean, it will unlock the import door once more.