Receiving a spam complaint can feel like being betrayed by your best friend, especially when you’ve worked so hard to build a permission-based list of prospects and customers who should be familiar with your business.
Don’t be too quick to equate spam complaints with back-stabbing, however. Some email characteristics cause your legitimate permission-based email to look like spam to your audience, which can trigger ‘accidental’ spam complaints. In this 5-part series, I’ll show you the 5 most common consumer spam-complaint-triggers and how to avoid accidentally pulling them.
Trigger #1: Mistaken Identity
It’s safe to say that clearly communicating your identity is the number one way to reduce accidental spam complaints. According to a survey by the Email Sender and Provider Coalition, 79% of consumers clicked the spam button when they didn’t know who the sender was. Here are the three keys to identifying yourself to your email audience.
- Make your From line familiar. Use the same words your audience uses to identify you or your business. For example, if you’re an online business and your customers refer to you by your domain name instead of your formal business name, put your domain name in your From line.
- Include your brand. Insert your logo into the upper left or center of every email and include image descriptions to identify you in case your audience has images disabled. Choose colors that identify your business when designing your email templates and use the same colors in every template you use. Don’t just use the stock template colors.
- Turn authentication on in your Constant Contact account. Remember that your audience includes Internet Service Providers (ISPs) such as Yahoo!, AOL, and Hotmail, because these companies control the delivery of your email. Authentication is a new technology that helps ISPs to identify legitimate email, and if your email isn’t recognized it could be filtered or tagged with a warning message.
John Arnold is the author of Email Marketing for Dummies and the Director of Constant Contact’s Local Expert Program.
