How do I reduce spam complaints for my emails?

Reduce Spam Complaints For Emails

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.


Actions to Take to Reduce Spam Complaints

You can significantly reduce spam complaints by improving your email practices in three key areas:


1. Verify Your Domain

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.


2. Optimize Your Emails

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.

3. Test Your Emails

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.


4. Clean Up Your Email Lists

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.

  • Use Confirmed Opt-in: Set up a confirmed opt-in process for all new subscribers. This provides concrete proof of consent, making any spam complaints unwarranted.

5. Avoid spammy text and content

The content of your email can significantly influence whether an inbound email server sends it to the spam folder. Spam filters analyze an email as a whole, looking at various characteristics and assigning a score. If the score exceeds a set threshold, the email is flagged as spam.

High-Risk and Prohibited Content

Emails that contain unbelievable claims or sensitive topics are high-risk for being marked as spam by both filters and recipients, and are often prohibited by terms of use:

  • Scam-like Subject Lines: Subject lines that use words associated with exaggerated claims, urgency, or money (e.g., "FREE," "GUARANTEED," "LIMITED TIME," "EARN EXTRA CASH").

  • Unbelievable Claims: Content that promises earning money fast, free products or services, or miracle cures.

  • Prohibited Content: Content related to adult material, gambling, prizes/sweepstakes, and pharmaceuticals.


Formatting and Style to Avoid

  • ALL CAPS: An entire email composed of capital letters is a major trigger, as it comes across as shouting and unprofessional.

  • Excessive and Random Capitalization: Frequent, random capitalization throughout the body of the email.

  • Excessive Punctuation: Overuse of punctuation, especially symbols like "$" and "!".

  • Using excessive exclamation points (e.g., !!!) in the subject line or body is a common spam tactic.

  • Irregular Formatting: Frequent variations in text color and size, or using text that is too similar to the background color.

  • Strange Spacing: Unusual or excessive amounts of blank space between characters or paragraphs.

  • Poor Spelling: Spelling errors or using tweaked spelling which are often used by spammers to try and bypass filters.

  • Broken HTML: Emails with incomplete or incorrectly coded HTML can be indicative of malicious behavior and may be flagged.

  • Image-Heavy Emails: Emails that are composed entirely of one large image or use too many images with little text can be suspicious to filters.

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