Set Up SMS Age-Gating

To set up your SMS Marketing program, you must agree to comply with Mailchimp’s policies and applicable laws, regulations, and carrier requirements. If your SMS Marketing program doesn’t comply with these standards, your account may be suspended or terminated.

Mailchimp uses automated age-gating to help businesses in the alcohol industry collect and message SMS contacts that meet the legal age of consent before they subscribe. This feature can help you verify your contacts’ age of consent before they are added to your audience.

Before you start

To use age-gating, you must meet specific plan, industry, and account requirements.

• Plan requirements: This feature is available for Standard, Essentials, or Premium plans with an active SMS add-on.
• Availability: You can only enable age-gating during the initial registration of a new SMS program or for previously rejected SMS applicants. Existing active SMS programs cannot be converted to age-gated programs.
• Industry focus: Age-gating is intended for businesses in the alcohol industry, such as breweries, wineries, or liquor stores.
• Date of birth collection: Mailchimp doesn’t store dates of birth (DOB) or specific age values. DOB is collected to calculate eligibility and we store an "eligible" or "excluded" status. You should ensure this verification method is compliant in your jurisdiction.

How it works

When age-gating is enabled, Mailchimp enforces age verification across contact ingestion paths, including signup forms, imports, the API, and manual additions.

If a contact meets the age threshold for their country (calculated based on their phone number's country code), they are added to your audience as a subscribed SMS contact. If a contact’s DOB is missing or verification fails, they are added to your audience with an SMS status of non-subscribed. These contacts may still be subscribed to your email marketing.

Enable age-gating

You must select the age-gating option during your SMS program registration flow.

1. Navigate to SMS and click Start registration.
2. On the Business information step, select Retail and consumer products as your industry.
3. On the Use cases step, check the box for Alcohol-related content (age-gating required).
4. Review the age-gating disclosure which explains that all new contacts must complete verification.
5. Complete the registration steps, including submitting your privacy policy and terms.

Once submitted, our partner Infobip will review your application and the age-gated landing page automatically generated for your program.

Collect age-verified subscribers

Every method you use to add SMS contacts will requires age verification once you submit your SMS application, even while your program is pending approval.

Use Landing Pages and Pop-up forms

For audiences with an approved age-gated program, Mailchimp automatically adds a required Date of birth field to any popup or landing page that includes an SMS field.

• Automatic detection: The form detects the visitor's country based on their browser settings or phone flag selection to apply the correct age threshold.
• Validation: The visitor must enter their birthday in the required format (MM/DD/YYYY for US programs; DD/MM/YYYY for others).

Import contacts

To import existing SMS contacts, your CSV or XLSX file must include a column containing the contact's date of birth. During the import process, you must match this column to the Age-gate field. Contacts with missing or invalid DOB values will be added as non-subscribed for SMS.

Add single contacts or use the API

• Single Contact Add: The "Add a Contact" form for age-gated audiences includes an inline age verification input.
• API: Developers must pass age verification parameters when adding contacts to age-gated audiences. The API will return an error if verification data is missing.

Why is age-gating not working?

Use these solutions for common issues with age-gating.

• The age-gating field is missing from my form: This field only appears automatically if your SMS program is approved and specifically flagged for alcohol-related content.
• An imported contact is non-subscribed: This occurs if the contact did not meet the age requirement or if the date format in your file was incorrect.
• My alcohol content is being blocked: Ensure your campaign is being sent to the audience associated with your age-gated SMS program. Content moderation only allows alcohol-related keywords for programs that have age-gating enabled.

Next steps

• About Age-Gating Requirements for SMS by Country
• Use Image Content Blocks in the Legacy Builder
• Use Image Content Blocks in the New Builder
• About SMS Marketing Compliance