It is Friday, you analyze your emailing campaigns of the month. Conclusion: your favorite email router is reporting new complaints from your audience. For a few weeks, your deliverability rate is decreasing.
Now that you have identified the problem, one major question remains:
“How do I manage the complaints I have about French ISPs?”
The basics before managing complaints from your emailing database
This issue is often raised by our clients who run monetization campaigns.
Loyalty campaigns, on the other hand, generate very few complaint issues.
Best practices to reduce the number of complaints from your email campaigns quickly:
- Your database must be 100% opt-in
- Your mailings must be branded (the name of your subscriber base appears in the email sender)
- Your marketing pressure must be reasonable
- You know your database and send campaigns that are likely to interest your subscribers
- Your objects must be clear and reliable
- You should not send the same campaigns to your subscribers repeatedly
If you fail to find yourself in these basic email campaign settings
Take this list and use it as a checklist for your next email campaigns.
It will help you reduce the number of complaints you receive very quickly.
Signal Spam: the standard for understanding the origin of complaints
If your knowledge and time allow you, join Signal Spam. Signal Spam is an organization that allows you to report emails that you consider undesirable.
The organization also allows you to understand why some emails are reported as spam. This is very useful to optimize your campaigns and increase your deliverability rate.
Don’t have time for Signal Spam?
If your schedule doesn’t allow you to easily follow Signal Spam, there’s still a solution:
Choose an email router that has joined Signal Spam. Mindbaz is a member of the organization and collects and analyzes statistics of complaints by IP from the main French Internet Service Providers (ISPs).
Understand why subscribers report your emails
Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and spam
Orange and LaPoste are the two main ISPs in France. They have defined a complaint threshold not to exceed to avoid being blocked:
Do not exceed 1000 complaints and 1% complaint rate
per client base per day.
Is targeting only active users a magic solution for your email campaigns?
Active users, a key resource
If you have ever attended a conference on email marketing, you will always be given the same advice: “target your active subscribers!
Mindbaz emailing experts can also say this: your active subscribers are interesting for your campaigns. They will easily open your emails. With the right content sent at the right time, your KPIs (key performance indicators) will soar.
The importance of a quality campaign before targeting active subscribers
Some of our clients followed this advice after attending a conference without further advice.
They prepared a campaign to target their active subscribers for 1 month, but…
Their campaign reached 1.5% of complaints on Orange! An IP or a domain was blocked for several days. Worse scenario: the block becomes permanent.
Why did the number of complaints increase after the campaign?
Why so many complaints when the campaign targeted the most active users?
Answer: Because they are too active.
Every marketing database is different. There is no magic solution such as: target your openers at 90 days and you will always be under 1% of complaints!
However, there is a common logic to all databases: The most active subscribers in your database are those who generate proportionally the most complaints. We can draw the complaint curve as follows:
The most active subscribers complain a lot and so do the inactive
Which group to target to reduce the number of complaints in your email campaigns?
Test and analyze your campaigns
Each subscriber base is unique. The best way to generate a low complaint rate is to find the most responsive user target. Test based on criteria that work on other channels to start, like social networks or your website.
Then, analyze your email campaigns and check against your intuitions.
Advice from Mindbaz emailing experts
“Start by mailing your 3-month active users. Then adjust your targeting based on the complaint statistics you get.”
Bruno Dermoune, Mindbaz Customer Service Manager
We usually say that complaint rates and unsubscribe rates are proportional in emailing. Try it out: compare the unsubscribe rate of your recent subscribers with those of less recent active subscribers
e.g.: churn rate of active subscribers 1 month VS churn rate of active subscribers between 2 and 3 months
What to do with inactive subscribers in your email campaigns?
You’ve been watching our graph and the conclusion seems simple:
– Target regularly active subscribers without focusing only on the most recent ones.
> OK
– Target inactive users to lower the complaint percentage.
> No
Yes, a person who does not open does not complain. But it is strongly discouraged to send emails to subscribers who have been inactive for more than 6 months.
Beyond this period, there is a good chance that some of your addresses will be turned into spamtraps. ISPs like Orange and Laposte know this technique: their anti-spam solutions detect these behaviors.
Send a special campaign for inactive subscribers
- Warn them in the subject line: if they don’t act, they won’t receive any more emails from you.
- Offer them a solution to a strong pain point.
- Play on emotion to reach them: emojis, strong action verbs, empathy…
In other words, after 6 months, stop sending emails!
If you’re not sure, take a look at the key metrics for a campaign targeting inactive subscribers:
- Open/click rates
- Unsubscribes
- Campaign ROI
- The impact of these mailings on your deliverability
- etc…
You will quickly realize that targeting this population has no interest and on the contrary only presents disadvantages and risks for your deliverability.
If despite the optimization of your targets your complaint rates are still high, ask yourself the right questions!
I advise you to improve first:
- Your selection process
- The knowledge of your subscribers’ skills
- Your campaign selection method
Discover all our tips to improve your deliverability on our blog!