How Mailchimp got its users

Put your mark inside the block your output is already forced to show a stranger. Mailchimp did not add a banner to the top of emails. It put the badge in the campaign footer, beside the unsubscribe link and the physical mailing address that anti-spam law requires on every marketing email. That footer is the one block a recipient scrolls to on purpose, because it is where the unsubscribe link lives. Mailchimp even backstops it: if its system does not find the *|UNSUB|* merge tag in the email, it appends its own extra footer.

done whenYou can name the exact element of your output that a non-user must look at to do something they want (unsubscribe, cancel, verify, download, accept). Your mark is inside that element, not floating elsewhere on the page.

Ship the mark as a tag the sender pastes into their own template: stylable, not removable. In Mailchimp the badge is the *|REWARDS|* merge tag, sitting in the footer content block next to *|UNSUB|* and *|HTML:LIST_ADDRESS_HTML|*. Every user can pick the badge style so it does not wreck their design, and landing pages offer two styles. What the free plan does not offer is an off switch.

done whenA free user can recolour or restyle your mark to match their own design, and there is no setting anywhere in the free tier that takes it off.

Stamp every artifact a free account can put in front of a stranger, not just the main one. The badge is on the email footer, on signup forms, and at the bottom of published landing pages. Hosted forms and landing pages are Mailchimp-generated pages with their own URL, so the address bar carries the brand before the visitor reads a word. On landing pages the badge also holds a Report Abuse link to Mailchimp's Abuse Desk that nobody can edit, which frames the whole badge as a trust marker rather than an ad.

done whenWrite the list of everything a free account can send, share or publish to someone with no account. Every line on that list carries your name, and you can say exactly where on each one.

Price removal as a named line on a paid plan. Mailchimp's pricing page lists branding removal as something the free plan does not include and Essentials and above do. That makes the badge two things at once: the price a free user pays for the free tier, and a concrete sentence a prospect reads when deciding whether to pay.

done when'Remove our branding' is a visible bullet on a paid tier of your pricing page, and you can point to at least one customer who upgraded and named it as a reason.

Pay the sender for the click, so customers who are allowed to remove the mark keep it anyway. Mailchimp's badge is a referral link. When someone clicks a customer's badge and signs up for a paid plan inside a 60 day window, bill credits land in both accounts, the referrer's and the new customer's. Paid subscribers who could disable the badge choose to keep it and earn from it, so the mark keeps spreading past the free tier, where a plain watermark would have stopped.

done whenAt least one paying customer who has the option to hide your mark has kept it on purpose, and can tell you in one sentence what they get for it.