Email Marketing News and Tips

With email service providers (ESPs) now paying a lot of attention to the feedback coming from their subscriber base, the issue of spam complaints has become increasingly more important in assessing and maintaining good deliverability rates in your email marketing efforts. Spam complaints are triggered when an email recipient clicks on the “Mark as Spam” button usually offered by many of the web-based email service providers. ESPs - like Yahoo, Hotmail and AOL - allow their users to report messages they do not want in their inbox as spam.

To allow email marketing service providers to track complaints, a lot of ESPs offer what is called a “Feedback Loop” (FBL), which means that the sender will be notified when a subscriber marks an incoming email message as spam. Feedback loops are the reason why an email marketing application like BlastWizard can tell you how many complaints you got for a certain email job. Check out this blog post for a list of ESPs that offer feedback loops.

In BlastWizard, whenever a complaint is received, the sender is automatically unsubscribed from the account’s master unsubscribe list. To ensure adherence to email marketing best practices and to maintain high deliverability rates for our customers, Boomerang closely monitors the number of complaints generaged by each email job and addresses any issues directly with the responsible customer. A high complaint rate will not only affect the deliverability of your email campaings, but also of the service provider you use to send them. An acceptable rate for such complaints is less than one per thousand emails sent - calculated for each email job or campaign.

How to Minimize Spam Complaints

• Stick to the basics of making sure that you are sending to well cultivated and maintened opt-in lists, where you made it clear to your subscribers what type of content they would be getting, how often they would receive it, and where it would be coming from. Send out opt-in confirmation emails whenever appropriate.
• Send only content that is relevant to what your recipients had signed up for, one that carries value and specifically addresses their interests and needs.
• Always make sure your that your recipients can easily identify you as the source or the sender for the email and content. Always use a recognizable name to appear in the ‘From’ line of your email.
• Make your ‘Unsubscribe’ link and related text visible and easy to read and understand. Also ensure that the unsubscribe process is seamless and straight forward. Boomerang has recently added a capability to populate an “unsubscribe” button in the menu bar of each opened email message, when sent to certain ESPs.
• If you are using more than one email application to send out your email campaigns, make sure to always update your unsubscibe lists, where approriate, to avoid sending to an already-unsubscribed recipient.