A better approach to spam complaints for you and your clients

Published November 19, 2009 by Ros Hodgekiss

After some very insightful discussion with our community, we’ve made some improvements to our spam complaint notification process for resellers of Campaign Monitor.

Initially, if a single client sent a campaign which attracted a sufficiently high number of spam complaints, then everyone’s accounts – including the reseller’s – would be locked. This undoubtedly caused a lot of trouble, especially for designers who had resold Campaign Monitor to multiple clients. Now, if a single client sends a campaign that attracts a high number of spam complaints, then the client’s account only will be locked. The result – resellers of Campaign Monitor are now protected in the event that a single client sends a dud campaign. For all other customers, the process has not changed.

What happens if my client’s campaign receives spam complaints?

If a client sends an email campaign which receives spam complaints from more than 0.3% of email recipients and the actual number of complaints exceeds 20, a white-label warning email will be sent to them:

An email will be also sent to you letting you know that your client’s campaign has received a high number of spam complaints.

Should the complaint rate reach 1% of emails delivered and the actual number of complaints exceeds 20, we will lock the clients’ account, but not those of other clients. The client will see the following message if they try to send further emails:

You will also see the following message next to the client’s name on the dashboard:

Although both you and your client will be able to login, neither of you will be able to send emails on behalf of this particular client. Note that if multiple client accounts have been locked at the same time, then your account will be locked, too. In this instance, neither you, nor all your clients will be able to send email.

Re-opening a locked account

In the instance that either your account, or that of one of your clients is locked, you will need to contact us immediately. We will require as much detail as possible about the campaign that resulted in the account being locked, including the origin of the subscriber list and how subscribers opted-in to receive email from the designer or client.

If it has been shown that you and your client have operated within our anti-spam policy, terms of use and have made every effort to meet our guidelines, then in many cases, we can re-open the account.

Will this ever happen to my campaigns?

If you pay attention to our permission policies there is very little chance that you, or your clients will ever reach the threshold required to receive a warning email, let alone face account closure. Ultimately, your complaint goal should be zero, however we do understand that people will often hit the ‘Spam’ button instead of unsubscribing. Typical email campaigns get very few to no spam complaints, so reaching the 0.3% warning threshold for a given campaign is certainly worthy of a red flag.

Spam complaints are taken very seriously here, as they not only affect the deliverability of specific campaigns, but can impact sender reputation, the deliverability of other customers’ campaigns and even get our mail servers temporarily blocked by unhappy ISPs. Read more about how spam complaints are recorded - we have a similar, white-label resource that your clients can read in the Help section of their accounts.

Overall, this is a great improvement to the spam complaint process, which for resellers of Campaign Monitor, will ultimately reduce a lot of the risk in taking on new clients. Please do share your thoughts on this change in the comments section below.

14 Comments

Posted in: New Features & Updates

14 Comments

Julian Wellings
November 20, 2009 12:06am

Thanks for taking the time to refine this process guys.
Does the same process apply to customers where we are doing the sending ourselves?
Joe Turner
November 20, 2009 2:14am

This is a very welcome decision, especially for agencies running an email tool for clients.
Luc Pestille
November 20, 2009 2:17am

Very important update for small agencies like the one I work for - we’ve got 15-20 clients on CM, and one being closed not affecting the others is a bit of a weight off my mind…
Ash
November 20, 2009 2:17am

I have found in the past from talking to “Average Joe/Jane” that they use their spam link/button in their email client as a quick unsubscribe link. So I think that spam figures can be misleading.

These are normally the same people that go to Google, and type the web address of the site they want to go to, in to the search field. www. .com and all.
Victoria Cooke
November 20, 2009 4:03am

A great update that we certainly welcome being an agency - but Ash makes a very valid point!!!
Diana Potter
November 20, 2009 4:58am

@Ash, We take those kind of complaints into account. Everyone tends to see those “spam = unsubscribe” complaints from time to time unfortunately, it’s only when the rates go far beyond the average that warnings or terminations are triggered and even then we’re always happy to review the situation.
Tony Geer
November 20, 2009 9:07am

This is great stuff. Just today I demoed CM for a client and they really liked it. This is a weight off of my mind.
Ros Hodgekiss
November 20, 2009 9:48am

@Julian Wellings When you are sending on behalf of clients, the same thresholds for spam complaint warnings and account locking apply, however in the instance of having your account locked, both you and your clients will be able to log in, but not send any email. This process is the same as before - take a look at this help topic for more information.
Ros Hodgekiss
November 20, 2009 9:51am

@Luc & @Tony Geer - great stuff! Apart from being more fair to other clients, we were really looking at a way to make things less stressful for resellers. Sounds like we can all sleep easier this weekend :)
Dan Johnson
November 25, 2009 2:02am

Excellent enhancement. It’s a fair approach and easy for us to explain to our clients as well.
Walter
November 26, 2009 3:43pm

Excellent. It’s a much fairer and better way to do it. It’s always played in the back of my mind that one client could unfortunately affect all my clients using CM. This is fantastic, great enhancement.
Ros Hodgekiss
November 26, 2009 3:49pm

Thanks, Dan and Walter! Great to know that this change has helped you and your clients. Let us know if there’s anything more we can do :)
Donna
December 18, 2009 9:46pm

great article. I would love to follow you on twitter. By the way, did you hear that some Iranian hacker had busted twitter yesterday.
aquaman
January 30, 2010 8:26pm

This is great news. I had one bad client who got my account closed down so all my clients lost access and CM would not reopen it - very stressful. So, up until now I have been signing up each client with their own account so they are all in their own sandbox.

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A better approach to spam complaints for you and your clients