Compliance footer

You do not have to build an unsubscribe footer by hand. Every email compiled from a campaign or a journey step ends with a footer carrying your business name, your physical postal address, and a working unsubscribe link. You can design that footer with the Footer block in the editor, or leave it out entirely: a minimal compliant footer is appended automatically whenever your email body does not already contain one.

This article covers both layers: the always-on compliance fallback and the optional designable footer block. The footer is what keeps your sends inside CAN-SPAM and CASL requirements, so it is the one part of an email you cannot fully remove.

The footer is always added

When an email is compiled, Marketing checks whether the rendered body already contains an unsubscribe link (the {{unsubscribeUrl}} merge token). If it does, your design is left alone. If it does not, a minimal fallback footer is appended so the email still carries a working opt-out and your postal address.

The compile-time fallback footer opens with "You are receiving this email because you opted in to communications," followed by your business name, your postal address, and an Unsubscribe link. A second safety net runs at send: the per-recipient worker re-checks the body and injects a minimal footer if an unsubscribe link is still missing, so a send never goes out without one.

Where the business name and address come from

The footer's business name and mailing address are not stored on the email or the Footer block. They come from your account's legal profile, which is shared across every email you send and every other Mercleo product. The footer renders them through the {{businessName}} and {{businessAddress}} tokens, which fill in at send time.

The Footer block's Company Info section confirms this and points you to the right place: "Your company name and mailing address come from your account's legal profile (required by anti-spam law) and stay the same across every email. Edit them in account settings → Legal & footer."

Designing your own footer

To control how the footer looks, add a Footer block from the editor's block palette while editing a campaign or template. Selecting the block opens its settings on the right, grouped into Logo, Company Info, Legal Links, Style, and Spacing.

Logo: optional. Pick an image, then set Logo Width (40-300 px, default 120). If no logo is set, the logo is left out of the rendered footer.

Company Info: a read-only note. The name and address are not editable here; they come from your account legal profile, as covered above.

Legal Links: two switches. Unsubscribe (on by default) renders the unsubscribe link, and Update Preferences (on by default) renders a link to the recipient's preference centre. When both are on, the two links render side by side, separated by a pipe divider.

Style: Font Size (8-18 px, default 12), Text Color, Link Color (both default to a muted grey), Alignment (default centred), and a Hide on control that can hide the footer on desktop or on mobile.

Spacing: the padding around the footer block.

How the unsubscribe and preferences links are built

The unsubscribe and preferences links are unique to each recipient. At send time a signed (HMAC) token is generated carrying the account, the contact, and the recipient's email, and the unsubscribe URL is built from it. The preference-centre URL reuses the same token, so the two are always consistent for a given recipient.

The same one-click unsubscribe (RFC 8058) is also added to the email's List-Unsubscribe header, which is what drives the native Unsubscribe button in inboxes such as Gmail and Outlook. Clicking the footer link or the inbox button both add the address to your account suppression list.

Journeys and transactional campaigns get a footer too

Journey email steps carry the identical guarantee: the same compliance fallback applies whether the email came from a campaign or a journey. Setting a campaign's email type to Transactional changes how the send is classified, but it does not change the footer: the same fallback applies to every campaign regardless of email type, so the unsubscribe link and postal address are still included. The footer is the baseline that every send shares.

One exception: a journey's internal operator-notification step, which alerts a configured team member that a contact reached that point in the journey, carries no compliance footer. Its recipient is an operator address you configured, not a contact, so the marketing footer rules do not apply to it.