Though many direct marketers think e-mail recipients using services like AOL and Yahoo! hit the report-spam button indiscriminately, the information it provides is becoming just as important as response and open rates.
“It's a response rate; it's just a different type of response,” says Josh Baer, chief technology officer for pay-for-performance e-mail marketer Datran Media.
For one thing, DMers' spam-complaint rate is the most important attribute inbox providers consider when deciding whether to accept their e-mail.
“The No. 1, if not the only, influence on your reputation at an ISP is this button,” adds Baer. “There may be one or two other little things that are 5% of the problem, but 95% of the problem [when e-mails get treated as spam] is how many people clicked ‘This is junk.’”
By all accounts, a spam complaint rate over 0.5% will cause serious delivery problems.
Also, the report-spam button isn't going away anytime soon. During a presentation at the Federal Trade Commission's spam summit in July, Margot Koschier Romary, AOL's senior manager for anti-spam operations, called it “the single most important thing we've done to get us out from behind the eight ball and be there to counterpunch as soon as we see a modification in [spam] cybertechnology.”
Brad Taylor, an anti-spam engineer for Google's free e-mail service Gmail, recently posted a call on the company's blog for users to hit the report-spam button more often.
“Your most powerful tool is the report-spam button,” Taylor wrote. “Use it early and often. That isn't just there to get the spammy message into the spam folder. It sends valuable information back to the spam team that helps us flag messages and senders so we can keep future messages out of your and millions of other inboxes.”
Granted, the number of people who visit Google's blog probably isn't up there with YouTube, but the message is clear: For the ISPs that use it, the report-spam button is a crucial tool for keeping unwanted garbage from polluting people's inboxes.
So what's a permission-based e-mail marketer to do? Embrace the button, that's what.
It offers unprecedented insight into how recipients perceive individual campaigns.
“Marketers need to watch their complaint rate as closely as they watch their open rates,” Baer says. “You've got positive feedback and negative feedback. Those two are both critical, and they tend to go together.”
Several of the top ISPs, including Yahoo! and AOL, have so-called feedback loops available, making it possible to monitor e-mail recipients' complaints. Feedback loops let marketers monitor complaint rates as well as determine what causes complaints to rise, such as a bad subject line or an irritating increase in frequency.
Marketers using homegrown technology or purchased software usually must sign up for feedback loops, according to Baer. The process can be as easy as filling out a Web form, or can involve signing a contract and some technological tweaks.
Baer notes that most e-mail service providers offer feedback-loop monitoring, but it's up to marketers to ask if they've been signed up for feedback loops, and at which ISPs. He says complaint rates should be measured from campaign to campaign so DMers can better determine what's causing the problem. And, he adds, an e-mail's content generally isn't to blame.
“When people click ‘This is spam,’ it's almost exclusively influenced by the ‘from' line and the ‘subject’ line,” he says. “It has absolutely nothing to do with the body or the content of the message. …This doesn't mean you can't do anything to the body that will affect complaint rates. But the first place to look is not necessarily the most obvious.”
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