How to Troubleshoot Spam Complaints Issues?

High spam complaint rates can permanently damage your sender reputation and email deliverability. Here are some strategies to locate the source of complaints and safeguard your reputation.

What are Spam Complaints?

Spam complaints occur when recipients mark your emails as spam, typically by clicking the "Report Spam" button in their email client.

This signals to email providers that your content is unwanted or doesn't match recipient expectations. Spam complaints are among the most damaging metrics for your sender reputation and email deliverability.

As a sender, you should:

• Monitor your spam rate daily

• Investigate systematically any spikes to identify root causes and take corrective action.

Since April 2024, spam rates officially play a crucial role in your ability to send emails to major providers like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Orange. Learn more: Understanding the spam complaints rate.

Troubleshooting Methodology

Follow this step-by-step approach to identify the source of spam complaint issues:

1

Review your onboarding process

Is your marketing consent presented clearly and in compliance with local legislation and sender best practices?

2

Check the timeline

Look for correlations between recently sent campaigns and spam complaint spikes.

Note that recipients may see emails several days after you send them, and tools like Google Postmaster Tools have a 48-hour data refresh delay.

3

Identify your worst-performing campaigns & automations

Your poorest-performing campaigns sent during that period of time are likely the one irritating your audience the most.

4

Check spam reports & mailbox providers tools

Spam complaints reports and tools like Google Postmaster Tools provide useful information to identify the message causing irritation.

Use the recipient's email address contained in the spam report to understand what motivated that user to report your email as spam.

Alternatively, Google Postmaster Tools' "Feedback Loop" report will help you to identify which messages are irritating your audience (Learn more: Using Google Postmaster Tools).

Common Causes and Solutions

If you are still having trouble identifying the issue, here are common mistakes to avoid:

→ Non-Compliant Marketing Consent Collection

Hypothesis: Subscribers probably aren't expecting your emails or don't want to receive specific types of messages.

Solution: Ensure your marketing consent collection process complies with legal requirements and email sender guidelines.

Best practices include:

• Consent must be given through a clear positive action that's distinct from other actions

• Explain what types of marketing emails you'll send, how often, and provide examples to help recipients make informed decisions

• Avoid ambiguity about the nature and scope of consent. For example, accepting terms of use and privacy policy cannot also serve as consent for marketing emails

• In some countries, consent requires an unchecked checkbox that must be checked by users to give consent. In others, manual validation (double opt-in) is required for legitimate opt-in

• Don't consider recipients as opted-in unless they have given clear, explicit consent

These are generic examples. Always consult your legal advisor to ensure compliance.

→ Missing Unsubscribe Links

Hypothesis: Marketing emails are being sent as transactional messages without unsubscribe links.

Solutions:

• Review your email activity to ensure that marketing communications aren't sent to recipients who declined marketing communications.

• Types of marketing messages commonly mistaken for transactional emails include: welcome emails, abandoned cart alerts, review requests, and others.

→ Hard-to-Find Unsubscribe Links

Hypothesis: The unsubscribe link may be difficult to locate.

Solutions:

1

Use clear wording

Simply label your unsubscribe link "Unsubscribe"

2

Make links visible

• Use footer text no smaller than 10 pixels

• Choose colors that contrast clearly with your email's background

• Separate the unsubscribe link clearly from other footer content (business address, legal mentions, etc.)

• For very long emails that may be clipped by Gmail, add an unsubscribe link at the top in a banner.

3

Make unsubscribing easy

Unsubscribes are always better than spam complaints.

Always provide a global unsubscribe option alongside "update email preferences" to allow selective unsubscribing from marketing communications

→ Excessive Marketing Pressure

Hypothesis: You're sending emails too frequently or aggressively.

Solutions:

1

Map your user journey

Map your user journey to see how many emails new subscribers receive in a single week. You can also review the performance of each steps of your automations:

2

Identify the most irritating messages

Try to identify the worst performing campaigns by calculating a dissatisfaction rate for each campaign.

• The dissatisfaction rate is the proportion of people who are dissatisfied when receiving a specific type of emails. You can calculate it by using the following formula: Amount of unsubscribed users / amount of clicks * 100.

• Campaigns above 30% should be reviewed carefully.

3

Review your segmentation

Never target all your opt-in subscribers. Focus on subscribers who have opened an email in the last 60-90 days.

During high-communication periods (like Black Friday):

• Pause campaigns / automations that might be less useful, to make room for more important messages on sales, and more.

• And/or improve your segmentation to focus on active users, instead of increasing the marketing pressure for all your subscribers.