Understanding How Batch Handles Spam Complaints

Learn how spam complaints impact your email deliverability and Batch handles complaints to keep your sender reputation safe

About Spam Complaints

→ Understanding Spam Complaints

A spam complaint occurs when an email recipient marks a message as spam in their email client.

Recipients may flag emails as spam based on their personal judgment of the content, frequency, or relevance of the messages they receive:

→ Monitoring Spam Complaints Is Essential

Spam complaints are serious indicators of potential issues with your email marketing strategy.

Mailbox providers, like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft or Orange closely monitor these complaints to determine your sender reputation, which directly affects your email deliverability. Spam complaints have an important role in reputation issues.

→ Common Causes of Spam Complaints

Quality Issues & Marketing Pressure

Message Classification Issues

• Incorrect message classification (such as marking marketing emails as transactional, for onboarding messages for example).

• Mixing promotional content into transactional emails.

Content Quality Issues

• Suspicious content (including aggressive promotions or misleading subject lines).

• Technical problems (broken images, non-functioning links).

• Repetitive content (constant promotional offers without variety).

Frequency and Transparency Problems

• Excessive email frequency for non-critical notifications.

• Over-aggressive marketing (multiple daily emails with little value).

• Unclear communication about email purpose and frequency.

Userbase Quality Issues

Be sure your subscribers are aware that they subscribed to marketing communications, and know what they will receive and when. We recommend you implement a double opt-in logic to make sure your subscriber base is willing to receive your emails.

Above all, your opt-in process must comply with Batch guidelines.

Unsubscribe Experience Problems

• Poor unsubscribe link placement or visibility. The link may be difficult-to-find in long emails, often clipped by Gmail.

• Absence of a global unsubscribe link.

• Technical issues with unsubscribe functionality.

Targeting problems

• Emailing inactive subscribers who may have forgotten about your service and don't expect an email.

• Inadequate audience segmentation across different subscription sources.

• Failing to adjust content for different subscriber acquisition channels (e.g., targeting the same way users who subscribed to your newsletters and customers).

Spam Complaints Management

→ Spam Complaints Sources

Batch monitors spam complaints through:

• Standard Feedback Loops, coming from mailbox providers (FBLs, see a list here)

• Independent feedback systems like Signal Spam

As a sender, you are responsible for monitoring spam complaints across all your sending domains. A spam complaint rate exceeding 0.3% requires immediate investigation and corrective action.

Google does not provide specific email addresses associated with spam complaints, necessitating a proactive testing approach to identify and address potential issues.

Orange only provide specific email addresses associated with spam complaints if users give consent, and only if these complaints are done from the Orange's app or webmail.

→ Spam Complaints Handling

When Batch receives a spam complaint, the system automatically:

1. Unsubscribes the complaining email address

2. Blocks future marketing communications to prevent additional complaints

3. Records the complaint for analysis and improvement

This immediate response helps maintain a healthy sender reputation and ensures compliance with email marketing best practices.