Spam

Spam complaints:

When you are running an ethical, permission-based email campaign, they can seem confusing.

After all, you are not spamming, right? So why would you get a complaint?

And yet, if you run an email marketing campaign long enough, you will eventually get one. Or more.

So How Many Complaints Are Too Many?

Why do they happen?

What happens if you get too many?

And how do you avoid them?

If you are concerned about getting email delivered, you need to address these concerns. As you may know, subscribers using many web based email services like Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL, Road Runner, Excite, Netzero, and Outblaze (mail.com) have an option available at their fingertips to report messages they don't want in their inbox.

Whenever this button is clicked by a user of many of these email services, our team is notified of it in order to address potential issues with excessive complaints.

To monitor potential issues, we regularly calculate these number of complaints over the number of messages sent from each email campaign. In order to maintain the best deliverability rate and ensure email marketing best practices are being used, sometimes our Solutions Team may need to address these issues with customers.

At any given point, your campaign's messages / complaints rate should below .1% (one-tenth of one percent). One or less per 1000 emails sent.

The deliverability of email messages is largely dependent on the reputation of the sender, among other factors. If your complaint rate is elevated for a period of time, it may affect not only the deliverability of your own messages, but also those of the service you use to send them.

If your complaint rate exceeds .1% for a period of time, you may be contacted by our Customer Solutions team to discuss the rate, reasons why it may be elevated, and what needs to be done to get it back to the appropriate levels.

Fortunately, there only a few necessary steps to take to avoid issues and help ensure you get the best possible deliverability of your messages.

• Do Not Take Permission for Granted
• Use Confirmed Opt-In
• Send only Valuable, Relevant Information

When adding subscribers to your campaign, take a moment to think about what kind of permission was given to receive email messages from you. Has each and every person specifically requested to receive email messages from you? Was it clear to them that they were doing this when you got their permission? If not, simply do not add them to your list.

Sometimes it takes only one incorrect email address on a list to cause issues. If someone repeatedly receives messages from you they did not request, they very well could mark each message they see as SPAM. The only way to know 100%, that each and every address receiving messages on your list belongs to someone who requested your information is to use a confirmed opt-in feature.

Permission is a required foundation for getting email messages delivered, but it is not the only necessary component of an effective campaign that avoids complaints. SPAM may have many definitions dependent on the perspective of its definer, but for deliverability the most important perspective is that of the ISP delivering your messages. Increasingly these services are defining SPAM as anything their users have expressed that they don't want in their inbox using the "Mark as SPAM" button.

These complaints may be trying to tell us one or more ways we can significantly improve results and avoid issues with our campaigns. Fortunately, by using email marketing best practices such as those we talk frequently about on this site, we should continually find our campaigns in good standing.

How Do Spam Complaints Work

eMail deliverability is serious business. We and our customers take great care to manage their lists well so they can enjoy the best possible deliverability. Even so, occasionally subscribers lodge spam complaints. When your subscriber does this, you feel indicted. After all, you’re not spamming. Your subscribers come to you and sign up. Nameless, faceless guys hawking drugs and penny stocks are sending spam. You’ve gotten enough of it in your life to know the difference between it and what you send.

So why did your subscriber cry SPAM. Whenever someone gets an email in their inbox, several buttons can be used to take action with the message, such as:

• Reply
• Forward
• Print
• Delete

In most, if not all, email programs, there’s also a button labeled “Spam” (or “Junk”). If the subscriber clicks on it, the message is deleted. The subscriber is also telling the ISP that he/she doesn’t want to get email from this sender. Whatever else happens behind-the-scenes doesn’t concern Susie Subscriber, at least not in her mind.

So I Did Not Spam - but I Am Still in Trouble:

One spam complaint won’t ruin your day. Getting a lot of them can cause problems for you. One possible effect of a high complaint rate may be an ISP content filtering your messages (not delivering messages with your website URL in them). ISPs know that their customers use the “Spam” button to unsubscribe. Since your subscribers are coming to you and asking for your information, you shouldn’t be getting many complaints. If you are getting more than you’d like, however, there are steps you can take to minimize your complaint rate.

Confirm Your Subscribers. Prompt your subscribers to confirm their subscribe request (via a link in a confirmation email) prior to making them active on your list. This helps to qualify your subscribers, which helps to minimize your complaint rate.

Include Subscription Details in Your Messages. Place a section at the beginning of your messages that details why the subscriber is receiving them, along with instructions for unsubscribing. This can reduce your complaint rate and possibly your unsubscribe rate, by jogging your subscribers’ memory of why they’re getting email from you.

Stay On-Topic. Your subscribers are signing up to get a specific set of information from you. If you send something that’s not consistent or relevant to what they signed up to receive, it’s likely that you’ll get more complaints.

Following these guidelines will help you to keep your complaints to a minimum and free your time and mind up to focus on other areas of your mailings and business.

Permission is a Good Start

There is more to good email deliverability than permission alone. Much goes into getting email delivered, and your email service provider should take care of a lot. However, you hold some of the keys to good deliverability in your hands, too. But if you don’t use them, you’ll have to confront declining delivery and response rates.

Relevancy also matters:

Relevancy affects your reputation, which affects your deliverability. If you’re not providing value to subscribers, their actions with your messages will reflect that. Relevancy has to do with whether what someone wants and expects to receive from you is actually what they do get from you. Tell your subscriber at the outset what you are going to send them and how often you are going to send it.

Remember, permission is specific — people ask for a specific set of information, at a specific time, from a specific party (you). Relevancy complements that permission as you consistently provide value to subscribers.

What Can You Do to Get Your Email Delivered

A bit of a broad question, sure, but the truth is that email deliverability comprises multiple factors. Getting a simple yes/no answer to “do you use DomainKeys?” (we do) isn’t going to tell you that your emails will get to your subscribers’ inboxes. To help answer that broader “How Do I Reach The Inbox?” question, we put together an email deliverability guide.
Everything you need to know about eMail can be found here