Causes of spam recipients complaints

First of all, in order not to wear the proud title of a spammer, you do not need to deal with spam. No matter how it sounds, but this is the only way to conduct an advertising campaign without complaints. Everything must be done according to the law, and if your business is legal, then the newsletter must be thought out carefully. If you send newsletters or other letters of the same type for too long, you will most likely be reported as a spammer. It is only a matter of time. In fact, if you have a mailing list of fifty thousand people, then by involving him on the mailing list twice, you will receive one or two complaints. And this is the minimum. Sometimes, this is simply an erroneous user action, who thus wants to "unsubscribe" from the newsletter or hide an unwanted letter. He simply presses a special button in the mailbox interface, not knowing that he is “writing a complaint” about your company. But this is a very serious action, and it does not matter whether it was a mistake or not. For example, the mail server @ mail.ru , having received a very small number of complaints against you, will further block all emails from your server. Moreover, it is very bad if you are not mailing for your company, but provide this service to many other organizations (like us, UniSender ).




In fact, receiving complaints from time to time is inevitable. E-mail mailing services constantly analyze spam messages and recipient complaints. This allows you to immediately find out about the problem and respond to it. Email delivery is redistributed to other servers and IP addresses. In parallel with this, the question of the existence of an account is being considered.
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If a spam message arrives from you, you are guilty until proven otherwise. After all, the main task of the e-mail service is to make the mailboxes of its customers clean. At the same time he has so many clients that there is absolutely no time to listen to the excuses and complaints of each of them.

However, as long as your mailing list is a legitimately collected base, and you can not hesitate to prove that every complaint is just a mistake - your situation can still be saved. If the legitimacy of your methods of collecting addresses can be questioned, then most likely your account will be blocked. Therefore, even when a list of addresses is legally purchased or rented by you from a legal point of view, you can still be mistaken, because repeated use of the same list by you and your predecessors will lead to a very large number of complaints.

Let us now see how complaints can be prevented.

What is a spam complaint?

It is very easy for the user to put a few checkboxes in his mailbox and turn the list of objectionable letters into spam. When this happens, the complaint is sent to the operator of the email. And many users do not even know about it. They believe that the "This is spam" button is just a way to "unsubscribe" from the list. And they do it! After all, the mail server blocks the distribution completely, having received a sufficient number of complaints against the same sender. Then the service staff send you (the author) a message about the complaint.

This is usually a very short letter that does not give out the identity of the person who complained about spam. In addition, the letter will certainly contain a warning that if you do not pay attention to this problem and the situation does not change soon, all letters from your address will be blocked in the future. If complaints from users continue, the account is blocked. Sometimes temporarily, and sometimes forever. The mailing service monitors all incoming complaints (all 100% without exceptions), and almost always there are real people on the staff of the company who manually approve one or another account. The sender in violation of certain rules always receives a letter from one of these people with a short description of the complaint and some recommendations for further action.

What are the causes of complaints?

If you are an honest person and do a newsletter according to all the rules, then why are you accused of spam attacks? Sometimes it’s just a user's mistake, but more often it’s your own blunder. And this is why it can happen:

1. You legally made the base of recipients, but too delayed with the mailing list. If a person has agreed to receive letters from you two years ago, then today the mailing will surprise him or even make him angry - you need to ask permission again;
2. if you have an online store, it means that you also have a user base, i.e. those people who did your shopping. When a profitable action or a series of discounts is planned, of course, there is a great temptation to immediately start sending out to the available addresses, but you must nevertheless ask for permission;
3. If you buy a list of addresses, then you think that you can immediately do the newsletter. Nevertheless, you must first send small letters to people with a message about how you got their address, and the question whether they want to receive informational messages from you;
4. Also, do not write off email addresses from business cards or profiles. This information is not for distribution, but for other needs.

In all these cases, the most important mistake is the lack of personal permission from the user. To legally conduct your business and online distribution is not enough for success. You need to get the consent of the addressee.

How to prevent complaints?

Probably, you have already understood that the main secret of success is permission to send. If you do not receive it, it is unlikely that any sense will come out of the newsletter. Let's see how you can prevent some complaints about you:

1. use the double confirmation method (double opt-in). This gives you evidence that each person has given permission for the newsletter;
2. even if the recipients are your clients, do not send them letters without permission. When a person buys products from you, fills out questionnaires and provides information about himself, he absolutely does not count on the rough use of his mailbox for promotional purposes;
3. Do not buy or rent lists, this is just a waste of money. As mentioned above, this list certainly buy not only you, but someone else. As a result, one addressee receives a whole sea of ​​unwanted letters every day. At one point, he just marks them all with the necessary checkboxes and sends them to the scrap. In this case, your mail account will also go there;
4. make for the user a button or link “Unsubscribe from the mailing list” in each letter. Such a button should be present not only by law, but also by the rules of good form. The button needs to be made bright, catchy, comfortable. This method will be much more convenient for both you and the user. In addition, you will earn trust in this way. And, of course, there will be no complaints about you, because you will no longer need to press the “This is spam” button. The most important thing is to understand that the presence of such a button will not decrease your profit, but, on the contrary, will increase along with your reputation;
5. create a beautiful letter that will look like this so that your company will appear to the user as respected and reliable. If you are not an artist or designer, hire a professional. Remember that mailing is the face of your organization. If it is a cheap design, content with errors, tasteless design and variegated font colors - you will instantly receive a million complaints and be blocked;
6. Always make your mailing conditions open. Tell people what, when and in what quantities you will send. If a person subscribes to weekly news, then you should not in addition to this send every four days advertising services or messages about your promotions. You will immediately turn into a spammer and a cheat. However, even if the newsletter was interesting to the person, he would still refuse your letters, preferring to read the news elsewhere. You need to clearly understand the difference between the newsletter (news) and the gross imposition of their services, advertising goods. Most likely you will need to create two different lists of addresses - one for information, the other for advertising.