Manage Your Spam Complaints

  • Updated

When a contact who receives your email did not want your content in their inbox, does not remember signing up for your list or finds your message offensive in some way, they may mark your email as Spam. These actions are recorded and can work against your sender reputation. It's important to keep an eye on these complaints as you manage your digital presence.

Act-On provides your current spam complaint count in each Sent report. If you wish to see the actual rate, download your Rollup report. Your raw spam complaint numbers and your spam complaint rate are two of the columns displayed.

Note: These spam complaint counts do not include Gmail addresses. Google does not share this data with Act-On, so it cannot be displayed on the platform.

What Do I Do If I Get Spam Complaints?

A user must take some initiative and effort to access the 'Report' button in most email clients. This means that a spam complaint is a clear signal that they don't want messages like this in their inbox.

Spam complaints should be addressed by analyzing the message contents and the frequency of your sending. These are the two factors that influence spam complaints in most cases. You should check your message's potential spam scores before sending it.

What Is an Acceptable Complaint Rate?

Your campaign's messages to complaints ratio should be below 0.1% (one-tenth of one percent) at any given point. Since this may be hard to envision in a real-life situation, the data below 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 Campaign Goes Over the Limit?

The deliverability of email messages 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, this often results in degraded inbox placement and eventually blocks your domain from sending to particular email clients. The best resolution path is to reduce sending frequency and send only to your most engaged contacts while analyzing what might be driving these complaints and changing your marketing practices accordingly.

How to Reverse Spam Complaints

Sometimes contacts will want to re-engage after opting out for a period, or they might have accidentally submitted a spam complaint report but wish to continue receiving Act-On emails. Reversing their complaint report will allow them to start receiving Act-On emails again. 

To initiate a spam complaint reversal, submit a ticket to our Technical Support team. When contacting us, please provide an attachment of the email where your contact has asked to reverse their complaint. This email must be from the same email address that sent the complaint

Once approved, we will remove the contact's email address from the Spam Complaints List, and the contact will be able to receive Act-On emails again. 

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