About Forwarded Campaigns and Unsubscribes

Subscribed contacts can forward an email campaign with their inbox forward button or with Mailchimp's Forward to a Friend feature. We encourage you to include a Forward to a Friend link in all your email campaigns, because it allows us to track shares better and also protects your contacts from being accidentally unsubscribed.

In this article, you'll learn about forwarded campaigns and unsubscribes.

What can happen

Unsubscribe merge tags in your campaigns are associated with the contact who originally receives your campaign. When someone forwards their campaign to a friend with the Forward button in their inbox, they'll send the campaign as-is, including the unsubscribe link. If the friend doesn't want to receive emails like that, they could click unsubscribe, and not realize that they have unsubscribed their friend and original recipient instead of themselves.

When the contact clicks Forward to a Friend, however, a new version of your campaign is forwarded that doesn't include an unsubscribe link. In this version, there is no way for a secondary recipient to unsubscribe the original recipient.

Protect Against Accidental Unsubscribes

If you think this could be happening with your campaigns, change the unsubscribe link text in your campaign footer to tell people what address is being unsubscribed with the *|EMAIL|* merge tag. This will display the original recipient's email address.

To add the merge tag to your unsubscribe link, follow these steps.

1. In the Content section of the Campaign Builder, click Edit Design.
   
2. On the design step, click to edit the content block that contains your unsubscribe link.
3. Click the < > Source icon to access the source code for your content block.
   
4. Add the *|EMAIL|* merge tag to the text for your unsubscribe link. Your code should look similar to the following example code.
   <a href="*|UNSUB|*">Unsubscribe</a> *|EMAIL|*.
5. Click Save & Close.

We recommend that you always preview and test your email campaign before you send.