Setting Up Email Tracking Consent for France & Italy

This guide helps Mailchimp customers who have contacts in France or Italy understand how they can use Mailchimp's existing tools to manage email tracking consent. It covers the background on why this topic is coming up, what Mailchimp's tools can do today, and step-by-step examples showing how to put your counsel's instructions into practice using features already available in your account.

This document does not provide legal or compliance advice. Whether any particular configuration satisfies regulatory requirements is a legal determination for you and your counsel and not something Mailchimp can confirm on your behalf.

Why This Matters

If you have contacts in France or Italy, you may be hearing about new requirements related to email tracking consent. In April 2026, both France's data protection authority (CNIL) and Italy's (the Garante) issued guidance on tracking pixels in email (the tiny invisible images that tell you whether someone opened a message, when they opened it, and on what device).

Here's a summary of the key points from the guidance. This is intended as background so you can have an informed conversation with your legal counsel about what applies to your situation, it's not legal advice or a substitute for a conversation with your legal counsel.

• Tracking pixels need separate consent from sending emails.
• Consent should be collected when the email address is collected.
• Recipients should be able to turn off tracking without unsubscribing.
• Tracking should be disclosed up front.
• Emails that don't require consent to send (e.g., transactional messages) aren't automatically exempt from the requirement to obtain consent for tracking.

Important: This summary is here to give you context, not to tell you what you need to do. Whether and how these requirements apply to your specific situation, including which contacts are in scope, what consent language to use, and how to handle the transition, is a legal determination for you and your counsel. Mailchimp can't confirm whether any particular setup satisfies CNIL or Garante requirements.

Mailchimp's Capabilities

Mailchimp doesn't have a native, purpose-built tool for this yet, but you can build a mechanism for obtaining consent using existing features: signup forms, audience fields, segments, and campaign-level tracking settings. This section describes what Mailchimp's tools can do today as it relates to managing per-contact tracking preferences. Whether your specific setup satisfies CNIL or Garante requirements is a legal judgment for their own counsel to make, not something we can confirm on their behalf.

Summary of Existing Capabilities

Using Mailchimp's Current Capabilities

Here is a step-by-step guide you can follow to use Mailchimp's capabilities to collect consent:

Step One: Add a location field and a separate tracking-consent checkbox

These are two different things that solve two different problems. A location field identifies who might be in scope (France/Italy). The checkbox is the actual consent. You need both.

1. Add a Country/Region field to your signup form so new contacts land with usable location data.
2. Add a second, distinct checkbox specifically about tracking, separate from your general marketing/GDPR consent field. Bundling them together doesn't meet the separate-consent requirement.
3. Use plain language naming the mechanism. You should work with legal counsel to determine exact wording but for illustrative purposes here's an example: "I agree to allow the use of tracking pixels in emails to measure my opens and clicks."
4. Leave the checkbox unchecked by default, and do not make it required to complete signup.

Step Two: Create a Tracking Consent field to store the answer

Mailchimp doesn't have a native tracking-consent field, so you'll need to build one and connect it to your signup form.

1. In Audience > Settings > Audience fields and |MERGE| tags, add a new field named "Tracking Consent" as a Yes/No (radio button) field.
2. Map your new signup form checkbox to this field: checked = Yes, unchecked = No/blank.
3. If you collect consent via API instead of a form, write Yes/No directly to this field on contact create or update.
4. Keep an external record of consent changes over time (an export snapshot, or your own CRM/consent system). Mailchimp does not maintain an audit log of when this field changes.

Step Three: Segment and send two versions of every campaign

There is no per-contact tracking toggle in Mailchimp today. Tracking is set per campaign, so achieving per-contact control means splitting your sends based on both fields together, not consent alone.

1. Build a segment for: Country is NOT France/Italy, OR (Country is France/Italy AND Tracking Consent = Yes). Send this segment with Track opens and Track clicks turned on.
2. Build a second segment for: Country is France/Italy AND Tracking Consent is No, blank, or unknown. Send this segment with tracking turned off (Settings & Tracking in the Email builder).
3. If Country is blank or unverified for a contact, treat them as if they're in scope (route them to the untracked segment) rather than assuming it's safe to track them.
4. This step is fully manual. It only works if you remember to do it for every send.

Step Four: Let recipients withdraw consent without unsubscribing

1. Add a link in your footer to your preference center that lets contacts update their Tracking Consent field.
2. Re-check this field before building your segments for each new send, since withdrawal only takes effect on your next manually-segmented campaign, not automatically or retroactively.

Step Five: Consider whether you need to provide notice to or obtain consent from existing contacts

Here are some steps you can take to provide notice to existing contacts. Your Tracking Consent field starts blank for every existing contact, so there's nothing to segment on until you run this.

1. Make sure your Tracking Consent field (Step 2) already exists before you do anything else here.
2. If you have location data elsewhere (billing/shipping address, CRM), import it into Mailchimp as a Country field first, so you know who to prioritize. Mailchimp's built-in Predicted Location (IP-based) can supplement this, but treat it as a rough signal only, not a source of truth.
3. Send a one-time, dedicated notice to your existing France/Italy contacts explaining the change and linking to your preference center.
4. Turn tracking OFF on this notice campaign itself.
5. As contacts respond through your preference center, it will automatically capture their tracking consent as a Yes/No answer in the field. Anyone who doesn't respond stays No/blank, and gets routed to the untracked segment going forward.

Additional Considerations

• Retroactive withdrawal on already-sent email: if someone withdraws consent today and opens an email you sent months ago, the pixel in that old email still fires. There's no mechanism in Mailchimp, or in most ESPs today, to prevent this.
• You are responsible for managing your own process for keeping segments and fields up to date.
• This is operational guidance, not a legal compliance determination. If you need certainty about whether this satisfies CNIL or Garante for your business, that's a conversation for your legal counsel.

Additional Resources

• Use Click Tracking in Emails: https://mailchimp.com/help/enable-and-view-click-tracking/
• Use Open Tracking in Emails: https://mailchimp.com/help/about-open-tracking/
• Collect Consent with GDPR Forms: https://mailchimp.com/help/collect-consent-with-gdpr-forms/