When recipients mark your emails as "spam," it harms your sender reputation. If your email campaigns receive too many spam complaints, your Email Marketing services may be deactivated.
Industry Standard: The acceptable industry standard is 0.02% of all recipients (about 1 in every 5,000). While a small number is normal, you must keep this metric as low as possible.
The Risk: High spam complaints damage the relationship between our provider and ISPs, which threatens the deliverability of all emails. If the issue continues, the Compliance Team will close the account.
You can view your current spam complaint rate on your Email Campaigns dashboard by selecting a campaign and viewing its report.
You can significantly reduce spam complaints by improving your email practices in three key areas:
Ensure the email address you are sending from is authenticated. If your domain name is not verified, your emails are much more likely to end up in spam folders.
Design your emails to look professional and trustworthy, and give recipients clear options to leave.
Optimization | Description |
Footer Essentials | Include your Business Name and Address, a clear explanation of how you obtained the subscriber's permission (e.g., a permission reminder), and an easy-to-find unsubscribe link. |
Add Preaheader Text | This is the "preview" text shown next to the subject line in most inboxes. Adding compelling preview text reduces the likelihood of a spam report. |
Use Alt Text for Images | Add Alt Text to all images. This helps email providers quickly analyze the email's content and ensures text is displayed if images fail to load. |
Add UTM Tags | UTM Tags allow you to track all website traffic that originates from a specific email campaign. See how to add UTM Tags to your emails. |
Professional Design | Ensure your emails look reputable and well designed. Recipients who do not trust the email may not use the unsubscribe link and mark it as spam instead. Avoid sales language, all caps, and excessive punctuation in your subject line. |
Testing helps you find rendering issues and potential spam triggers before you send to your entire list.
Campaign Checklist Test: Run an inbox test from the campaign checklist by clicking Run inbox tests.
Manual Testing: Use the Send a test option to send the email to different email clients (Gmail, Outlook, etc.) to see how it renders. Ask friends or colleagues to send you screenshots of the email on their various devices and services.
Sending to an uninterested or unverified audience is the primary cause of high spam complaints.
Set Clear Expectations: When someone joins your list, explicitly state what kind of emails they will receive and how often.
Remove Unverified Addresses: Immediately remove any email addresses you do not have explicit permission to email.