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Every email marketer receives spam complaints. It does not matter if you use confirmed opt-in or have never personally seen a complaint in your life, your messages get complained about. Unless you use an email service provider (ESP) like EmailLabs, or if your ESP does not provide these services, you may not even have immediate access to these complaints. So what do you do about it?
If you are operating a mailing list gathered with good privacy practices such as confirmed opt-in or good single opt-in (no pre-checked boxes or shady third party "opt-in" dealings), the steps below can help you identify complaints and minimize how many you receive.
To make sure you know about complaints:
- Make sure your abuse@ and postmaster@ addresses are valid and are able to receive email. Make sure that you have access to those addresses and can review incoming mail. These addresses are recommended by Internet standards set by IETF for reporting of complaints.
- Register the above addresses with http://www.abuse.net/. Abuse.net is a clearinghouse for registered abuse addresses and is used by many network administrators and tools to send complaints to the right destination.
- Register for a feedback loop. Some ISPs, such as AOL, will share with you complaint data they receive from their users. AOL’s feedback loop is set up as part of their whitelisting process. More information can be found here: http://postmaster.aol.com/
- Provide instructions for complaints in your Privacy and Anti-Spam policies. Often times a less tech-savvy recipient will want to complain to you but will not know how. Make sure that your privacy policy is linked at the bottom of your email as part of the footer.
Spam complaint percentages (spam complaints divided by messages sent multiplied by 100) can very widely based on the composition of your list, your opt-in approach, type of content, frequency, your brand and more. For example, AOL recommends keeping spam complaints below 1-3% of traffic, depending on volume. This figure is unique to AOL’s user base, and we think is too generous if applied as a general standard. You should be at ranges of one complaint per six to eight thousand messages, or 0.013%. Of course, your mileage may vary.
Now that you’re getting more feedback about your mailings, what do you do about it? If you find incoming complaints are higher than optimal, or complaint rates are rising for your messages, look into the steps below to help troubleshoot:
- Brand your subject lines! This cannot be said enough. All mail systems that offer a spam complaint button do so at the Inbox level. This means that the recipient only needs to scan the subject lines and decide which messages to keep. A subject line such as "Exciting offers for you Bob!" will surely be marked as spam (see article Branding Your Subject Lines to Avoid the Junk Folder).
- Consider including the unsubscribe instructions at the top of your email in addition to the bottom. Some users use the “report spam” button as an unsubscribe method, and will not scroll through your entire message to get to your link.
- Include instructions for your users to whitelist your domain. This will prevent a user-based filter from mistaking your message for spam and either diverting it to the users’ spam folder or prefixing [SPAM] to the subject of the message.
- Set up and allow customization of user expectations. Make sure that you disclose how your organization will be using their email address. If you plan to send them email three times every week, make sure they are aware of it. Make sure you enable subscribers the opportunity to select preferences on your opt-in form and a link in your emails to a preference or profile update page.
- Avoid spammy looking content. Try not to use garish bold fonts, large red-colored fonts and the like. Avoid images with poor compression quality. A clean and readable design will not be as likely to be mistaken for spam.
These are just some of the ways you can decrease the spam complaints and increase the relevance of your messages. If your spam complaints stem from poor or downright abusive email collection methods, however, you’d practically have to start from scratch and re-evaluate your entire email marketing program.
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