What’s the best way to make sure your company isn’t flagged as a spammer? Answer customer complaints.
Michael Ellis discovered this truism when he became privacy manager for Toronto-based Date.com a year ago. When Ellis came on board, the dating site, which sends between 20 million and 30 million prospecting e-mails a month, “didn’t have the best reputation in the Internet community and didn’t have best practices in place,” he said.
He asked around among Internet service providers and blacklist groups to find out what the firm should be doing to improve its rep. They said two of the most important things any company could do to clean up its spam rap is have an abuse e-mail box and read the complaint mail that comes into it.
“We had it half right,” Ellis said. But when he checked the complaint box, it had 37,000 e-mails in it. Ellis answered all of them. He responded to unsubscribe requests and assured folks that if an affiliate marketer received one complaint in a million e-mails sent, they would be terminated.
Many companies just pretend their spam complaints aren’t there, he said.
“People were using worse language than sailors use because they weren’t expecting an answer,” Ellis said. “When I answered, they apologized. Over time, I got actual word-of-mouth sales from answering quickly.”
From the complaints, he discovered that Date.com’s unsubscribe link wasn’t working. He revamped it to send every unsubscribe request into a box that’s checked before each e-mail campaign goes out.
“It automatically scrubs the list for us,” he said.
“My e-mails have gone from 5,000 a week to 300,” Ellis added. “Big difference.”
