How To Stop Being Accused of Sending Spam To Your Email List

[jamawebinc]

If you are having a problem with spam complaints, here are some reasons this may be happening and tips that you can use to lower your complaint ratio.

First, everything (as in all marketing) depends on your market itself. Not everyone's market is "how to make more money on the internet". Those people, tend to be a little bit more net savvy than the average market.

Just yesterday, a family member sent their son's report card (showing off his straight A's) as an email attachment to my mother-in-law and one other person.

My mother-in-law forwarded the email to my wife and said she "doesn't know why they want to post this all over the internet"

Now, since my mother-in-law is not very net savvy she didn't realize it was an email attachment going to only 2 people. In her mind, this report card was posted somewhere online so a ton of people could see it.

She is not very internet savvy. And it's possible a lot of your subscribers are just like her.

They may not understand the difference in the delete button and "this is spam" button. Therefore they may use them interchangeably.

Unless you want to spend time educating your list about the difference in the two buttons, you will have to find another way to solve this problem.

Also, the way things currently are in the industry, it doesn't matter if it is wrong that people can push the "this is spam" button even when you are not sending spam.

This is the currently how things work so you have to find a way to work within these current rules. If you don't, your mailing list service provider will take certain steps if your spam complaint gets too high.

These include forcing you to use double opt-in (if you don't already) and possibly removing your account altogether.

Some procedures to use...

1) Email your list more often. Perhaps on a regular schedule. Or, at the end of your current email, build anticipation for your next email so they are on the lookout for it. If people haven't heard from you in awhile, they may forget they ever subscribed to your list.

2) When they took you up on your offer to get something free in echange for their email address, do you mention you will be sending them other emails as well? Or that by giving you their email address they are also subscribing to your mailing list.

3) Are the followups related to or reference what they signed up for to obtain in the first place? If you gave them the "Free Report About X" in exchange for their email address, did you followups ask what they thought about this report? If they have used the info in it?
If they wanted X, and were willing to give their email address in exchange for X, then talk about X - Not Z

4) Try putting a short paragraph at the very beginning of your email telling them they are receiving this email because they gave you their email address in an opt-in box and that they can unsubscribe anytime by clicking the link at the very bottom of this email.
( I learned this from Ben Hart - thanks Ben...)

[jamawebinc]

Originally Posted by skyfire

1st point about people forgetting the list is spot on. I sometimes seen that with feedburner subscribers as well. If you're not updating blog/list then they'll remove it.

Yes. Sometimes...perhaps in most cases, you have to send more email to your list, not less.

[Richelo Killian]

A study was done a couple of months back where a group of email marketers placed the unsubscription link at the very top of the email.

RESULT: SPAM complaints dropped to near zero, AND, unsubscriptions went DOWN!

I have adopted this strategy, and place an unsubscription link both at the top, and the bottom of my marketing emails.

My own results mirror that of the study done.

Go ahead, give it a try.

[davtom]

Richelo, I've had problems in the past with people clicking on the spam button. I've used that technique, then I had complaints from people who clicked on the unsubscribe link at the top not realising that it was an unsubscribe link!

If you're gonna do that, I suggest making it clear that it is an unsubscribe link, perhaps by doing the following:

** UNSUBSCRIBE LINK ** <link>

[TheNightOwl]

I tend to do the follwoing:


Write a short intro with a one-line teaser about what's coming up in the email. Then insert a little note saying something like:

*****************
Quick reminder:

You're receiving this because you joined [name of site or list]
on [insert sign-up date] using the email address [insert email].

If these messages no longer tickle your fancy or whatever, no
problem. Thanks for tagging along this far. Good luck in the
future with [some comment related to the topic of the email list].

You can say "Bye bye" via the following unsubscribe llink:
[insert unsub link]

All the best!
[name]

****************************

Then onto the message.



I don't do that on every list I run, but somethink along those lines on most.

Works okay so far.

[Vassago]

I joined a certain forum, which I won't mention in public a while back.

It wasn't long before the owner was using his "email all members" optin to send spam almost daily.

I personally deleted my membership to the forum just to stop getting the spam, and know a few others who did as well.

I wonder if anybody actually ever joined his programs compared to the effort to get the forum members to the ratio of how many dropped out?


Vassago

[ForeignProfessor]

Originally Posted by TheNightOwl

I tend to do the follwoing:


Write a short intro with a one-line teaser about what's coming up in the email. Then insert a little note saying something like:

*****************
Quick reminder:

You're receiving this because you joined [name of site or list]
on [insert sign-up date] using the email address [insert email].

If these messages no longer tickle your fancy or whatever, no
problem. Thanks for tagging along this far. Good luck in the
future with [some comment related to the topic of the email list].

You can say "Bye bye" via the following unsubscribe llink:
[insert unsub link]

All the best!
[name]

****************************

Then onto the message.

I think this is the right track, but it is way too long! Get it into a sentence or two instead of several paragraphs and it will be perfect. If that was at the top of every email I received from a list I'd probably never get down to the actual message.

I think there should also be a distinction made between IM and non-IM email lists. Most people on IM lists know whats up, and people on other lists don't. If you have a list in the non-IM niche you're likely to have many more clueless subscribers who NEED to know they can unsubscribe easily with just a click, and that this is BETTER than hitting the spam button. It's probably worth explaining it clearly in the first followup message when they join your list. They'll probably pay the most attention to that message.

For people on IM lists they probably understand what's going on, so unless you DO spam with relentless sales ads and no content the recipients shouldn't be hitting the spam button too much. If they do they're either super-newbies or you're really pi**ing them off.