Inbound & Digital Marketing Blog

Inbound Marketing and Email Complaints

March 6, 2009, Clarke Bishop

Greased Skid Marketing is now part of Inbound Team --The Atlanta, Georgia Inbound Marketing Agency specializing in helping businesses grow with online marketing.

Helen asked: Please explain the email complaint summary report. 

In Infusionsoft, the email complaint summary report shows the number of messages sent, the number of complaints and the percentage of complaints for each day.

You enter the date range that you want to see when you run the report.

A "complaint" occurs when someone hits their "This is Spam" button. Not all email programs and providers have this, but Google, Hotmail, AOL, etc. all do.

The report can be misleading. You might send out a batch to 1,000 people on Monday, then 20 per day for the rest of the week (For a follow-up sequence). The problem is you might get some complaints on the large batch that went out on Monday, but they come through on Tuesday or Wednesday. In other words, the data just shows what happens on each day -- Not which message triggered the complaint.

So, you really have to average the data over time to get an idea what is really happening.

Some people are just lazy and hit the Spam Complaint button when they want to unsubscribe. You should, at least, make your unsubscribe link obvious so that people will hit that instead of the Spam button.

Topics: Inbound Marketing, Infusionsoft