What Is An Acceptable Complaint Rate? :: AWeber Knowledge Base

Home > Support > Knowledge Base Home > Anti-Spam

Search the Knowledge Base:

Browse by Category

What Is An Acceptable Complaint Rate?

As you may know, subscribers using many web based email services like Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL, Road Runner, Excite, Netzero, and Outblaze (mail.com) have an option available at their fingertips to report messages they don't want in their inbox.

Whenever this button is clicked by a user of many of these email services, our team is notified of it in order to address potential issues with excessive complaints.

To monitor potential issues, we regularly calculate these number of complaints over the number of messages sent from each email campaign. In order to maintain the best deliverability rate and ensure email marketing best practices are being used, sometimes our Solutions Team may need to address these issues with customers.

What Is An Acceptable Rate?

At any given point, your campaign's messages / complaints rate should below .1% (one-tenth of one percent).

This may be hard to envision in a real-life situation, so review the following illustrating some different size campaigns with the corresponding acceptable number of complaints:

Messages	Complaints
1,000	< 1
5,000	< 5
20,000	< 20
100,000	< 100

What If My Campaign Goes Over That Limit?

The deliverability of email messages is largely dependent on the reputation of the sender, among other factors. If your complaint rate is elevated for a period of time, it may affect not only the deliverability of your own messages, but also those of the service you use to send them.

If your complaint rate exceeds .1% for a period of time, you may be contacted by our Customer Solutions team to discuss the rate, reasons why it may be elevated, and what needs to be done to get it back to the appropriate levels.

How to Keep Your Complaint Rate Low

Fortunately, there only a few necessary steps to take to avoid issues help ensure you get the best possible deliverability of your messages:

Don't Take Permission For Granted

When adding subscribers to your campaign, take a moment to think about what kind of permission was given to receive email messages from you.

Has each and every person specifically requested to receive email messages from you? Was it clear to them that they were doing this when you got their permission? If not, simply don't add them to your list.

Read more on acceptable and unacceptable lead sources in our Knowledge Base.

Use Confirmed Opt-In

Sometimes it takes only one incorrect email address on a list to cause issues. If someone repeatedly receives messages from you they did not request, they very well could mark each message they see as SPAM.

The only way to know 100% that each and every address receiving messages on your list belongs to someone who requested your information is to use the Confirmed Opt-In feature.

Send Only Valuable, Relevant Information

Permission is a required foundation for getting email messages delivered, but it is not the only necessary component of an effective campaign that avoids complaints.

SPAM may have many definitions dependent on the perspective of its definer, but for deliverability the most important perspective is that of the ISP delivering your messages. Increasingly these services are defining SPAM as anything their users have expressed that they don't want in their inbox using the "Mark as SPAM" button.

Read more on how to maintain relevancy once you've gotten permission from subscribers.