Unsubscribe vs Spam Complaints:
Which is worse?
Have the results of your email campaigns ever been overshadowed by questions raised regarding the number of unsubscribes?
Or has anyone ever expressed their worries to you regarding the ‘Spam complaint’ rates (or should they have)?
In case you’re not too sure how to interpret or explain the “Unsubscriber” or “Spam Complaint” metrics, look no further and click here to read more.
Losing customers is a scary thing for businesses. When consumers decide to unsubscribe to your newsletter, this is exactly the first thing that goes through everyone’s mind. However, is this fear justified?
Spoiler alert… No… No, it is not.
Your consumers should always be offered a clear and easy way to unsubscribe from your communication. Not just because this is a legal requirement, but also because having consumers unsubscribe from your newsletter is actually a good thing!
An unsubscribing consumer is someone that has taken the time to make a point: you’re doing something wrong. What am I doing wrong? Well, it can boil down to a couple of things:
- You could be reaching out to someone too often
- You could be reaching out to someone who’s not interested in what you have to say
- You might not have offered enough subscription preferences/options
- Your content might not be as good as you think or might even be mistaken for spam
This doesn’t mean that you should change your entire communication strategy, the moment you see a user unsubscribe.
An unsubscription rate below 0.5% is considered normal (below 0.2% is even considered pretty good).
Whenever your unsubscribe rate is consistently above 0.5% though, you need to step up your game and consider this your wake-up call: you need to make some changes.
A high ‘Spam complaint’-rate however is a much more frightening metric. Contrary to users’ unsubscribing, users complaining or marking you as spam can actually hurt your sender reputation. Spam complaints are a strong signal to mailbox providers that your emails are unwanted and they, in turn, try their best to protect their users. A high complaint rate will lead to deliverability issues, which will eventually cause you to:
- Be marked as ‘promotional’ content
- Be automatically moved to ‘Spam folders’
- Be blocked by mailbox providers altogether
- Be refused service by your ESP/Hosting provider
A ‘Spam complaint’-rate of more than 0.3% is considered bad. Anything slightly higher than that and you risk deliverability issues, which you will most-likely first encounter with Hotmail and Yahoo.
Aside from the immediate effects of a bad reputation as listed above, recovering from a bad reputation is also not an easy feat. Mitigating any of these points is a tedious, time-consuming communicative effort, and rebuilding a reputation can take months.
At this point, a couple of unsubscribers doesn’t seem like such a big deal now, does it?
Listening to your target audience is important and being able to easily unsubscribe is perhaps the most powerful tool that allows you to do just that.
In the end, losing a subscriber is not the same as losing a customer. Not allowing your consumers to be heard, however, can turn them against you which can have lasting effects on all your consumers & customers.
So, you know… just make it easy to let them –
