Fixing high complaint rates and improving reputation

Why do recipients complain about my email?
This question is asked over and over again and there is no one answer. There are a number of reasons and all of them interact with one another.
What factors have recipients mentioned?

  • High frequency – mail that is too frequent can annoy recipients and they’ll hit this is spam
  • Low frequency – mail that is too infrequent may be unfamiliar and unexpected and recipients will report the mail as spam
  • Content – mail that has content that recipients don’t like can annoy recipients into reporting spam
  • Mailing after recipient has unsubscribed – while CAN SPAM provides for 10 days to process an unsubscribe request, recipients often have much shorter expectations
  • Unrequested mail – do you really have permission from the recipient? Do they want and expect your email?
  • Mistake – sometimes recipients select large portions of their mail box and report all the mail as spam. Real mail can get caught in the selection and reported as spam.

The only one of these issues that is outside the control of the sender is the mistaken complaint. All the others are things that senders can affect.
Here at Word to the Wise, I often work with clients who are seeing delivery problems related to high complaint rates and the resultant poor reputation. I work with these kinds of clients to sift through their data to maintain as many good email addresses as possible. At the same time, in order to improve reputation the number of unengaged recpients needs to be as low as possible.  Working closely with clients I help them design and implement a strategy for list hygiene to improve reputation, response and return.
We start with a series of questions about the complaints. If you don’t know what is causing the complaints, then you can’t resolve the underlying problem. Some questions to consider.

  • Is this unusual complaint behaviour? If so, what changed recently?
    • Have we added new addresses from a new source?
    • Have we resolved a problem resulting in more emails in the inbox?
    • Did we change our frequency?
    • Did we mail new or unique content?
  • Are complaint rates consistently high?
    • How are we treating our recipients?
    • Are we sending mail they expect and anticipate?
    • Are we actually sending opt-in mail?
    • Are we setting expectations appropriately during the opt-in process?

Once you have an idea of why the complaints are happening, you can address the systemic problems.
Remember, it is extremely rare that a high complaint rate is the only problem with a mailing program. Usually, I find there are other list performance problems including poor open rates, poor click through rates, all evidence of low recipient engagement.
It can be a challenge to fix a mailing program with high complaints and low recipient engagement. The process takes longer than many managers like. However, the only real options are to spend so much time dealing with delivery and reputation problems that there are no strategic decisions being made or step back and make the strategic plans that create a sustainable email marketing program with few delivery problems.

Related Posts

Lashback tackles opt-in fraud

Last week Lashback posted a three part series on opt-in fraud.
One of the issues they commented on is that suppression lists are being passed around and some mailers are actually spamming them. This is something that used to be common, where spammers were harvesting email addresses from opt-out forms and then spamming the addresses or selling them to other mailers. This is why some ISPs and anti-spammers recommend recipients not unsubscribe from mail that they never subscribed to.
In the last few years there has been conflicting data on the prevalence of harvesting unsub or suppression lists. The FTC determined that there was no risk to recipients from unsubscribing. Lashback is now seeing some spam coming into their test addresses.
Overall, there are people who will continue to be suspicious of unsubscribing from mail they do not expect. This will drive up spam complaints and lower delivery. While responsible mailers are not the cause of the negative perception of email, they are competing with the spammers and scammers and sometimes recipients may not draw distinctions. This is why building relationships and trust over email marketing campaigns is such a critical part of delivery.

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Unsubscribe rates as a measure of engagement.

Over at Spamtacular Mickey talks about the email marketers’ syllogism.

  1. Anyone who doesn’t want our mail will opt-out.
  2. Most people don’t opt-out.
  3. Therefore, most people want our mail.

This clearly fallacious reasoning is something I deal with frequently with my clients, particularly those who come to me for reputation repair. They can’t understand why people are calling them spammers, because their unsubscribe rates and complaint rates are very low. The low complaints and unsubscribes must mean their mail is wanted. Unfortunately, the email marketers’ syllogism leads them to faulty conclusions.
There are many reasons people don’t opt-out of mail they don’t want. Some of it may be practical, the mail never hits their inbox, either due to ISP level filters or their own personal filters. Some people take a stance that they do not opt out of mail they did not opt-in to and if they don’t recognize the company, they won’t opt-out.
In any case, low levels of opt-outs or even this-is-spam hits does not mean that recipients want that mail. The sooner marketers figure this out, the better for them and their delivery.

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Choosing Twitter over Email to engage customers

Eric Goldman has an interesting blog post over at hit Technology and Marketing Law blog comparing and contrasting twitter and email. One of the reasons he likes Twitter is that it gives him, the ‘subscriber’ (follower in Twitspeak) control. There’s no chance that the company will sell his data. And, if the company does tweet too much that is uninteresting or irrelevant, the follower can ‘unsubscribe’ (or unfollow) without any fear that the company will override or lose the unsub request.
To my mind, the biggest problem with Twitter for B2C communication is the 140 character limit. On the other hand, it means that companies need to be clear in their language and concise in their tweets. Maybe the limited space is actually a feature not a bug.

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