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Here's Why
MailChimp is built for email marketing, which means we're built to send one-to-many messages. When you're sending one-to-many messages, all kinds of spam regulations, deliverability best practices, infrastructure issues, and netiquette apply. So we're kinda "hard wired" to never remove that unsub stuff.
Also, the unsubscribe process in your campaigns has to be able to do three things:
- Handle unsubscribes and remove them from your list automatically.
- Process bounce records (find bad addresses).
- Report abuse and other information to ISP feedback loops. ISPs require that we MAKE SURE this happens. As you can imagine, it's their job to keep spam away from their customers, so they want us to play by the rules. We don't get a free pass either just because we're awesome.
If you want to use your own unsubscribe link, you're probably thinking about sending one-to-one sales or transactional messages where you wouldn't typically need or want an unsub link (but you probably want tracking).
If you're thinking about sending a sales email, look into our CRM integrations: http://mailchimp.com/crm/
If you're thinking about sending a transactional emails, look into our integration with Amazon SES: http://mailchimp.com/features/simple-transactional-service/
Adding an Unsub tag to your HTML email
We require all email campaigns sent through MailChimp to have our properly coded *|UNSUB|* tag. There's absolutely no exceptions to this rule. Here's one of the ways you can add our *|UNSUB|* tag to your email.
- In your footer, click where you'd like to place your Unsubscribe link and click the edit button.
- Type out what you'd like your subscribers to see and highlight it. In this case, we chose "Unsubscribe".
- In the toolbar, click on the link icon, which looks like a broken chain link.
- This will bring up the Link window. Set your Protocol to other and place your *|UNSUB|* merge tag in the URL field.
- Click ok and your unsub link will be all set up.
You can find more about adding our *|UNSUB|* tag to your emails with the How do I place my *|UNSUB|* (unsubscribe) Tag in my HTML version? article and Unsubscribe Tag Troubleshooting guide.
Footer content isn't visible
If the links in your footer just isn't visible, then it will seem like you don't have an *|UNSUB|* link, even if you really do! Here's how you can style links in your footer so they'll stand out.
- On the Design step of the Campaign Builder, open the style editor.
- Go to the footer tab.
- You can style links in the footer link tab.
Want to know more about customizing your footer? Check out the How Can You Customize Your Footer? article.