Complaint Lists.
The bigger ISPs (Verizon, Microsoft and Google) all run what are called Complaint Lists. This is where (unsurprisingly) they manage and maintain a list of complaints about email campaigns. Whilst exact practices for handling complaints are hard to come by unless you know the ISP, what happens in principle is this: They review the header information of the email that you sent out, and take a note of the IP address (remember that IP reputation we discussed in a previous blog) and Header information. From this they start to compile a list of campaigns from either your subdomain or the IP you’re sending from. If an ISP sees a significant number of people complaining about the same message, it will start flagging these on a Complaint List against the IP Address from which the messages originated (remember, they’re buried in the header and can’t be changed). Once this starts happening, then you have to be careful because once you near 0.5% of the recipients you’ve targeted on your campaign at that ISP, you will start to be viewed as a Bad Sender and that’s when you can run into problems. This score gets used in the rules to determine how your next email campaign will be handled next time. Just like the stock market, however, these scores can go down as well as up. I’m guessing you’re wanting the scores to go down as they’re a negative factor in deliverability. And if you’re behaving like a good sender, they will go down. It should go without saying (particularly in light of the various Privacy laws enacted around the world such as GDPR, CAN-SPAM, PECR etc) that being able to prove that the person you’ve sent to actually requested this stuff is the best situation because you have what is called Proof of Optin. This isn’t a get out of jail free card, but does at least show that at some time the recipient interacted with you and you are only doing what you told them you’d do all along (you did tell them you were going to email them, right? And they did agree that that was OK? Good, just Checking!)Sensible precautions
It should go without saying but always ensure that you can prove optin for people you’re sending to. Historically, companies that have bought data are on very dodgy ground here, particularly if the list in any way pre-dates legislation. Even today, most bought data is fraught with risk so we would strongly advise against using it (it’s even part of our Terms and Conditions that you mustn’t use bought data). It therefore makes sense to ensure that you’re using the best possible data collection methods and always make it clear to recipients (either by a Welcome Automation or similar series of messages to explain) what you’re going to be sending these people, and how often you’re going to be doing it. This minimises the likelihood that someone’s going to complain. The last thing your marketing team needs to be doing is to spend time fixing a reputation that was damaged because of an oversight or a desperate attempt to grow your audience which backfires on you. We have already reviewed Complaint Lists above, so let’s review two other key factors:- Unsubscribe rates
- Targeting dead domains
Unsubscribe rates
Unsubscribe rates are (unsurprisingly) the rate at which individuals unsubscribe from your campaigns. I realise this is a painful subject because nobody wants to hear that they do not want to be heard. But sadly in this world, people do unsubscribe. There’s two or three things to consider when reviewing this:- Feedback Loops
- List-Header unsubscribes
- Unsubscribes