A recent Return Path study shows that email sender reputation, and not content, is the major factor in whether marketing emails reach the inbox – 83% of the time, sender reputation is the cause of filtering.

That being the case, e-marketers are increasingly having to recognise the principal factors that affect sender reputation, and one of the major ones is spam complaint notifications. This represents a growing problem for legitimate email broadcasters – a typical scenario is where the email recipient knows and accepts that the email was solicited by them at some stage in the past, but now wants to be removed from the list, and can’t see any obvious way of doing so ( usually because the unsubscribe link is buried in a 6 point font somewhere in the email footer in the hope that it won’t be seen ! ). In such a situation, the spam button then becomes a convenient alternative to unsubscribing !

This represents a double-whammy for the e-marketer – in addition to losing a member from the mailing list, these notifications are fed back to the ISP that the email account is held with, which ultimately compromises the sender reputation of the sender if these notifications are received in sufficient quantities. And we are not talking big numbers here – Return Path regards complaint rate statistics of greater than 0.65% of all emails sent as indicative of “high risk” status.

However, many e-marketers are not aware of this vital metric. While a number of email service providers participate in feedback loop schemes with the major ISPs, very few of them expose this data to the campaign reporting suite. For this reason, while they will have visibility of unsubscribe requests, they will have no visibility whatsoever of spam complaint notifications, even though the driver behind these metrics is often fundamentally the same – “I want to be removed from your list”. It’s a great illustration of the old conundrum that if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.

That’s why e-marketers often throw up their hands in horror when we present our standard remedy to this problem, namely that the unsubscribe link should be presented somewhere highly visible, like the email header. ”But surely that will increase my unsubscribe rates ?” they ask incredulously ! It’s quite possible that it will, but if one has access to all the facts ( ie what level of spam complaint notifications are being received ), it then becomes possible to quantify the trade-off between the two.

Often, it will appear at face value to be a neutral offset, with the unsubscribe requests going up, and spam complaints going down by a similar amount. We’ve seen this ourselves – DBGi clients who have made the change have typically halved their spam complaint notifications.

In reality, such a scenario actually represents a net win because of the enhancement in sender reputation that will result from a general ISP perception of improved broadcast quality. Greater visibility of the unsubscribe link also has spin-off benefits in terms of greater credibility in the eyes of the email recipient – a case of “Wow – this sender is actually prepared to put their money where their mouth is !”

So the recommended action plan is as follows :

         i.            Get a handle on the level of spam complaint notifications that your email campaigns are generating.

       ii.            Move your unsubscribe link to a prominent position within the email.

      iii.            Benefit from improved sender reputation as complaint rates show significant reductions.

For sure – it’s counter intuitive, but the benefits are proven, and represent a quick-win improvement opportunity for e-marketers in the ongoing ( and increasingly complicated ) quest for inbox delivery.

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