Editing your email footer
By Clint ParsleyLast updated
In short. Your account has one email footer, set in Settings → Sending. You can add lines above, between or below the two parts every email needs, your mailing address and the unsubscribe link, but you can't remove those two. Templates show it through the Email footer merge field, {{system.footer}}.
Your account has one email footer, and you edit it in Settings → Sending, under Email footer. It always holds your mailing address and an unsubscribe link, because CAN-SPAM requires both in every commercial email. You can add your own lines around them, such as your company name, a phone number or a line about why the reader is getting your email.
How do I change the footer?
Open Settings → Sending and scroll to Email footer. The box shows one footer line per row. Two of the rows are placeholders:
[Mailing address]becomes the mailing address on your account.[Unsubscribe link]becomes the link that lets the reader opt out.
Type your own lines above, between or below them, then choose Save footer. Blank rows are dropped. Your lines are shown exactly as you type them: merge fields such as {{contact.first_name}} are not filled in inside the footer. You can have up to 10 lines of your own, each up to 200 characters.
If you delete either placeholder, the footer is not saved and you'll see a message saying which one is missing. You can move them, but each one has to appear exactly once. This is checked on our side as well as in the form, so no footer without them can be saved.
Only an admin can change the footer. Until anyone edits it, the footer is your mailing address followed by the unsubscribe link, which is the footer SEMAOS always added.
Which emails use it?
Any template that contains the Email footer merge field, {{system.footer}}. The footer is filled in when each email is sent, so a change applies from the next send, including to emails already scheduled in a sequence.
- Simple templates add the footer at the bottom of every email by themselves. You don't need to place the merge field.
- Designed templates get it from the Compliance footer block. The block also has a "You're receiving this because..." line, which belongs to that template and can be edited there.
- Emails you write in the one-off composer get the footer added the same way a simple template does.
Templates made before the footer setting existed carried their own copy of the footer. SEMAOS switches those over to the merge field when their footer is still exactly the one the editor wrote. If you changed a template's footer by hand, that template keeps its own footer and does not follow the setting. To make it follow the setting, replace that footer with the Compliance footer block, or with the Email footer merge field.
Can a template have its own footer instead?
Yes, in the designed editor. A template whose footer is written out by hand, with the Mailing address and Unsubscribe URL merge fields, sends that footer and ignores the setting. It still has to carry both merge fields, or SEMAOS won't send it. The rules are in Unsubscribes, suppression, and CAN-SPAM.
Does the footer look different on each channel?
The text is the same on every channel. In the plain-text version of an email, each footer line is its own line and the unsubscribe link reads "Unsubscribe:" followed by the address of the link.