DMNews reports today on the results of a Spam Complainers Survey. The study queried consumer perceptions of what they consider to be spam, why they report emails as spam and what they think happens when the “report spam” button is clicked.

If you’re a permission-based, best practice email marketer take a deep breath before reading on …

Consumer perceptions of what they consider to be spam

56% consider marketing messages from known senders to be spam if the message is “just not interesting to me”
50% consider “too frequent emails from companies I know” to be spam
31% consider “emails that were once useful but aren’t relevant anymore,” to be spam

It would appear that even emails coming from a known sender, a known company and brand are vulnerable to the ‘report spam’ treatment.

Why consumers hit the “report spam” button

41% “the email was not of interest to me”
25% “I receive too much email from the sender”
20% “I receive too much email from all senders”

I’ve felt this for awhile – the word spam is pretty meaningless; you can have all the permission and recognition in the world, but if the recipient perceives your email to not be relevant, it is spam. And it might just get the ‘report spam’ treatment.

What consumers think happens when the “report spam” button is clicked

43% do not use unsubscribe links in email and simply use the ISP’s “report spam” button to unsubscribe
56% think that clicking the button will “filter all email from that sender”
21% think it lets the sender know this specific email wasn’t useful, so they’ll “do a better job of mailing me” next time
47% of respondents believe by hitting the “report spam” button they will be unsubscribed from the list.

What the ISPs need to do …

It has been clear for some time – but highlighted in bold in this survey: ISPs need to work with ESPs, and all the striving permission-based best practice email marketers, to create a different set up then just a general ‘report spam’ button that the user clicks for such a wide variety of reasons.

What’s a permission-based, best practice email marketer to do?

Get proactive. Strive to send emails that don’t make the recipient want to report it as spam.

1) Ensure the unsubscribe function is extremely visible and one-click easy to use – and really works.
2) Look at offering a customer preference panel for the user to select what they’d like to get from you and when.
3) Review your permission policy across the company, make sure you have one and adher to it.
4) Have suppression processes in place. Suppress removes ASAP.
5) Check that all departments together aren’t overmailing subscribers.
6) Review your procedures for dealing with inactive subscribers – they could be a source of your ‘report spam’ because they do not want your emails anymore and are tired of deleting them. And the next one they receive gets the ‘report spam’ treatment.
7) Constantly monitor for problems. ISPs offer feedback loops – here’s a good ClickZ article about it- that gives you insight into ‘report spam’ activity. Increases should be reviewed against changes you’ve made in a mailing to see what is generating problems – e.g. a new list of subscribers, change in content, change in who it’s from, change in frequency, etc.

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Added [28/3/08] Mark Brownlow has done a great round-up blog post on this topic.

Also, check out this function: List-Unsubscribe header option. It’s text that can be inserted into the header portion of the message. The recipient sees an Unsubscribe button instead of a Report spam button. This only works with a few ISPs.

Posted on March 26th, 2008 under Email Marketing, HTML email newsletters, e-newsletter deliverability .
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