Best Practices for Maintaining a Low Spam Complaint Rate

How to maintain a low spam complaint rate

At Agency Revolution, we understand the importance of maintaining a low spam complaint rate to ensure effective email communications. To help you navigate the changes implemented by Google and Yahoo, we have compiled some best practices to assist you in achieving and maintaining a low spam complaint rate. By following these guidelines, you can enhance your email delivery and minimize the risk of being flagged as spam.

  1. Provide Clear and Relevant Content: Ensure that your emails are informative, relevant, and aligned with the expectations of your recipients. Avoid using misleading subject lines, excessive capitalization, or excessive use of promotional language that may trigger spam filters (e.g. “free,” “act now,” or ALL CAPS).
  2. Obtain Permission and Avoid Purchasing Client Lists: Always secure explicit permission before incorporating someone into your email list. This includes not purchasing client lists, as these individuals have not given you direct consent. Utilize a double opt-in process to confirm the recipient's consent, which significantly reduces the possibility of complaints.
  3. Segment Your Email Lists: Divide your email lists based on recipients' preferences, interests, or demographics. By sending targeted and personalized content to specific segments, you increase the relevance of your emails and reduce the chances of receiving complaints. To effectively send targeted communications, learn how to create segments in the Fuse platform by clicking here.
  4. Monitor and Address Complaints Promptly: Regularly check your complaint rate using Google's Postmaster tools or similar services. If you notice an increase in complaints, investigate the reasons behind them and take appropriate action to rectify the issue promptly.
  5. Authenticate Your Emails: Implement DMARC to authenticate your emails and protect against spoofing and phishing attacks. 
  6. Monitor Engagement Metrics: Pay attention to metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversions to gauge the engagement of your email recipients. By focusing on delivering valuable content to engaged users, you can improve your overall email deliverability.

In order to meet Gmail's new requirements, Agency Revolution will implement a "List-Unsubscribe" header in all outgoing emails from our system well in advance of Google's June deadline. This feature is designed to provide recipients with a straightforward and efficient way to opt-out from our mailing list with a single click.


Maintaining a low spam complaint rate requires ongoing effort and attention. By implementing these best practices, you can optimize your email communications and minimize the risk of being flagged as spam. You can monitor your spam rate by following these instructions.*

 

*Note: Postmaster Tools dashboards will only display data when there’s a sizable daily volume of email traffic coming from your Authentication Domains and/or certain other conditions, in place to prevent abuse. You may see a "No data to display" error message on the IP and Domain reputation dashboards. This can occur when your reputation is too low to show a value. Learn how to improve your email delivery rate here.