What are spam complaints and where to see them
A spam complaint is an email that a recipient has identified as spam. Users typically do this by moving the email to their "Spam" folder or simply clicking the "Report spam" button.
Reporting spam in Gmail
If there are a large number of spam complaints after sending out emails, email providers may start blocking emails from your IP address. To avoid this, follow these three rules:
- Always obtain user consent for your email campaigns. Use the double opt-in subscription method.
- Provide an easy, one-click unsubscribe option for subscribers. By law, an unsubscribe link is a mandatory part of email campaigns. In Altcraft Platform, you can't even save an email template without including such a link. Place the unsubscribe button in a visible location, either in the header or footer of the email. It's better to have subscribers opt out rather than report as spam.
- Regularly clean your email list. If a subscriber hasn't opened your emails in a month, they're unlikely to do so in the future. To remove inactive email addresses from your list, create a segment.
Altcraft Platform doesn't automatically delete a subscriber's email address if they report an email as spam. Instead, their subscription status is automatically changed to "Complainer," and campaigns are not sent to profiles with this status.
Resource subscription
It's worth noting that communication with the subscriber is only stopped within the scope of one resource. If a person has subscriptions to other resources, you will still be able to continue sending messages to them.
How to check complaint rate
1. Channels report
With a summary report, you can view the quantity and percentage of complaints for a specific campaign and for the resource as a whole. Go to the "Analytics" section and select "Summary report." Specify the time period for which you want to check complaints. Choose the resource and campaign. In the table below, various metrics will be displayed—find the "Email complaints" column.
If the percentage of complaints exceeds 0.07% within an hour, the platform will send a warning to the user's email.
2. Segments
If you want to find out who specifically in your database has complained about your mailings, create a segment with two rules:
filter by subscription to the resource with the "Complainer" condition.
filter by Email Opens with the condition "At least [n] times during last [x] days."
Why is it so? Above, we mentioned that the campaign does not send emails to profiles with the "Complainer" status. Using these rules, you will identify those who opened the received email — which means that at the time of the campaign launch, their status was "Subscribed" — and only after that did the status change to "Complainer," indicating that the person marked the email as spam.