Fix Mailchimp Duplicate Footer Content

I received an email from a past Mailchimp training attendee as follows; wondered if you’d come across anything like this – down the very bottom of the email – two footers appear? With two Mailchimp Monkey Rewards badges, yet when I go into the campaign there is only one footer. I have seen this problem numerous occasions (where more than one unsubscribe link and footer content appears in a Mailchimp campaign) and it is a really difficult thing to troubleshoot unless you know what to look for.

Why two Mailchimp footers appear

The Australian spam act specifies that businesses must make it easy for people to unsubscribe from electronic mailing lists as do all spam acts of which I’m aware specify the need to make it simple for people to unsubscribe from future email marketing. Mailchimp therefore ensures that an unsubscribe link is included in every email campaign sent from Mailchimp.

The default Mailchimp footer includes an unsubscribe link in every email campaign. Should the unsubscribe link be absent from a sent campaign then Mailchimp will automatically include the default footer which includes an unsubscribe link. What this means is that if you’ve edited the default Mailchimp footer and inadvertently changed the unsubscribe link then Mailchimp won’t see the unsubscribe link and will automatically include an additional footer. Hence multiple footers.

The reason that the automatically inserted footer content isn’t seen when creating your campaign is that Mailchimp only inserts the footer (if absent in your campaign) when the campaign is sent. If however you send yourself a test campaign or preview your campaign you’ll see the duplicate footer (if Mailchimp inserts the duplicate footer content block).

How to avoid multiple Mailchimp footers

By quite simply ensuring that the unsubscribe link in your email footer is correct usually resolves the issue of two footers appearing in email campaigns. Follow these steps to fix the unsubscribe link in your custom Mailchimp footer:

1. Go to the Design stage of the campaign builder in Mailchimp.
2. Click to edit your footer contact block.
3. To the right of the screen, under Content, click the word unsubscribe.
4. Click the Link icon in the toolbar.
5. Delete what you have in the Web address (URL) field and enter *|UNSUB|*
6. Click Insert then Save & Close.

The unsubscribe link in your footer is now what Mailchimp expects to see. Mailchimp should no longer insert a second footer content block in your email campaigns.