Consumers fighting for control of their inboxes

August 10th, 2007 by Kelly Rusk

Back from vacation and finally caught up enough to post! With the huge scariness I encountered in my inbox this week, the topic of permission/spam complaints seems very relevant.. so here we go!Even if you have a genuine, house-built double-opt-in list, it’s still possible recipients will unsubscribe, or worse, hit the spam button. Basically they are telling you they don’t feel your emails are relevant to them and they don’t want them (The Campaign Monitor Blog even says that consumers see “Mark as Spam” as really saying “Mark as irrelevant“). A high amount of spam complaints can tell you that you’re probably not setting your subscribers’ expectations well, and you should adjust your email strategy accordingly. However, there are many email marketers out there who just don’t pay attention… “We’re Can Spam compliant… that’s all we need to worry about.”

But while they may not be listening, ISP’s are. In fact, Campaign Monitor has also uncovered that many of the ISPs are singing the same tune as consumers:

Yahoo! Mail - Miles Libbey: Anti-spam product manager

“Operationally, we define spam as whatever consumers don’t want in their inbox.”

AOL - Charles Stiles: AOL Postmaster

“I don’t care if they’ve triple opted-in and gave you their credit card number,” said Stiles, drawing chuckles, but making his point loud and clear: Relevance rules, and catering to end user preferences is his top priority.”

Microsoft/Hotmail - Craig Spiezle: Online safety evangelist

“We need to think really a step beyond opt-in and focus on the consumer’s expectations, relevancy, and frequency.”

Gmail - Brad Taylor: Google Engineer

“Sometimes people are afraid to report a message because they aren’t sure if it is “really” spam or not. Our opinion is that if you didn’t ask for it and you don’t want it, it’s spam to you, and it should be reported.”

More and more, ISPs are going to rely on Sender Reputation vs Content filtering for detecting spam - which means if you aren’t keeping your subscribers happy and they complain, you may find your emails eventually making it to the junk folder. CAN SPAM doesn’t matter anymore–make sure you are keeping your subscribers happy and not marking you as spam by following these steps:

Have every subscriber explicitly opt in to receive email communications from you - No automatically adding customers, no pre-checked boxes, just those people who truly and really want your emails.
Tell subscribers what you will be sending & how often before they sign up. “Sign up to receive our weekly promotions featuring new items. Arriving every Wednesday, you can expect to find great deals on our products and expert advice for using them.”
Send recipients a welcome email immediately after sign up which re-iterates what your emails will be about how often you will send. You can also use this opportunity to ask subscribers to add you to their address book.
Never break the rules you set out - if you are going to change your frequency drastically, at least tell subscribers OR re-opt in.
If you see a rise in spam complaints, take the time to figure out what may have caused it, and do whatever you can to fix it.

Posted in Email marketing, Kelly Rusk |