How to Reduce Your Spam Complaints by 75%

By Neil Anuskiewicz

April 2, 2009 — Spam complaints can be detrimental to your email marketing campaign, and worse, tarnish your sender reputation.  Even the best permission-based email marketers (those who send relevant promotions and email newsletters to their opted-in subscribers) get some spam complaints. If you receive more than 1 complaint per 1,000 emails sent, or more than 0.1%, continue reading.

One of the most effective ways to reduce or prevent spam complaints is to put your unsubscribe link where it is easy for subscribers to find — at the top of your email. Many email marketers have reported a reduction in complaints of 75% or more after moving the unsubscribe link to the top of the email.

Some email marketers might be concerned that an easy to find unsubscribe link will cause more readers to unsubscribe, thus reducing their list size. The fact is, if subscribers who want to get off your list cannot find your unsubscribe link quickly (about two seconds), they are going to use the very easy to find complaint button in their email programs. Complaints hurt your future email deliverability so you want to do everything you can to prevent your subscribers from clicking on their complain button.

Subscribers are more likely to choose the unsubscribe button if you make it easy to find.  By making your unsubscribe link highly visible, you keep your emails from being blocked from those who really want to receive them.

Are you an email marketer that gets low complaints? There is always room for improvement. You may still want to consider making the unsubscribe link more prominent in your communications to bring your complaint rate down even lower and improve your deliverability.