Definition
A complaint indicates that a recipient of your email has used their inbox options to report your message as spam. In doing so, they are indicating that the message was unsolicited and they do not wish to receive messages from your mailing list.
Subscribers who mark a message as spam are automatically unsubscribed from the list they complained about, protecting them from further unwanted messages and your list from future complaints.
Note: If your account maintains an excessive complaint rate and you are unable to lower the number of spam complaints, your account may be shut down to prevent further unwanted email from being sent.
What is an acceptable complaint rate?
At any given point, your campaign's messages / complaints rate should be below 0.1% (one-tenth of one percent).
This may be hard to envision in a real-life situation, so review the following, which illustrates some different size campaigns with the corresponding acceptable number of complaints:
|
Messages |
Complaints |
|
1,000 |
< 1 |
|
5,000 |
< 5 |
|
20,000 |
< 20 |
|
100,000 |
< 100 |
What If My Complaints Go Over That Limit?
If your complaint rate consistently remains over 0.1%, it’s crucial to take steps to lower your complaint rate .
The deliverability of email is largely dependent on the reputation of the sender, among other factors. If your complaint rate is elevated for a period of time, it may affect not only the deliverability of your own messages, but also those of the service you use to send them.
If your complaint rate exceeds 0.1% for a period of time, you may be contacted by our Customer Solutions team to discuss the rate, reasons why it may be elevated, and what needs to be done to get it back to the appropriate levels .
Viewing Complaint Rates
There are two ways AWeber informs users about complaining subscribers:
-
In the Control Panel
-
By Email
Monitoring complaint rates can help you to optimize your email efforts.
Reviewing complaints in your account
To review complaints for broadcast messages in a campaign:
Locate Messages in the navigation bar and click Broadcasts.Under the Sent Broadcasts section, you can see the number of "Complaints" issued for the message.
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Reviewing complaints by email
When complaints are made about your campaign messages, AWeber will periodically send you an email message.
Along with a brief explanation of feedback loops , the message gives information on the list containing the messages that are causing the problem along with suggestions on steps that can be taken to reduce complaints in the future.
Since, as opposed to broadcast messages, which are sent once at a specific point of time, campaigns are sent continually over a period of time, these emails will keep you up to date on complaint trends for your messages.
How do I see who complained?
When a complaint is made by a subscriber, AWeber automatically unsubscribes them from your list.
No future email messages will be sent to them from the list they complained about, eliminating the possibility of future complaints from the same email address. In turn, this protects your email lists.
Since this is both the most appropriate and only effective action to take, and because additional actions taken can cause further issues, the identity of the complaining subscribers is not provided.