When a user receives an email from your Email Marketing campaign, their email service provider presents them an option to mark the email as "spam". If the emails that you send from your Email Marketing dashboard receive too many spam complaints from recipients, then you may be in danger of having your Email Marketing services deactivated. 

To see how many of your emails are being marked as spam, navigate to your Email Campaigns dashboard. Select one of your email campaigns to view the campaign report. You will see a number of people who marked the email as spam, as well as the percentage of users who marked it as spam.

Addressing high spam complaints

The industry standard for these kinds of complaints is .02% of all recipients (about 1 in every 5,000) - so while it is not out of the ordinary for an email recipient to mark one of your emails as "spam", it is important to keep that number as low as possible. 

If a Marketing 360® user receives too many spam complaints from their Email Campaigns, the Marketing 360® Support Team will receive a written notice from our third-party email Compliance Team. This warning urges the user to take action to reduce their spam complaints. 

These spam complaints are a concern because they damage our provider's relationships with ISPs and can even threaten the deliverability of the emails. If the spam complaints continue at an unacceptable level, then the Compliance Team will close the account.

Actions to take to reduce the number of spam complaints

There are a number of changes you can make to your email marketing practices to reduce spam complaints.

Verify your domain

When you send emails to your subscribers, you will want to make sure that the email address that the emails are "sent from" your business' email address. However, if the domain name attached to your business email address is not verified or authenticated, then your emails are more likely to end up in spam. See more information about verified domains and how to authenticate your domain.

Optimize your emails

• On the footer of your emails, include your Business Name and Address are included along with a clear explanation of how you got that subscribers permission, and give them the opportunity to unsubscribe immediately if they no longer wish to receive emails.
  For example: “You’re receiving this email because you have shown interest in _____.
  If you would like to unsubscribe at any time, please click
  unsubscribe below.”
  
• Add Alt Text to the images in your emails. Adding Alt Text to the images will help Google analyze the email more quickly. The more obvious the image name, the better. Also, when images do not display properly, the Alt Text will appear in a blank box that would normally contain the image (therefore, name your pictures sensibly and appropriately).
  
• Add Preheader Text in your email settings dashboard. Preheader Text is a "preview" of what's included in your email, which is shown in the inbox of most email providers, next to the subject line. Adding good preview text reduces spam complaints. 
• Add UTM Tags to your emails. UTM Tags allow you to track any website traffic that originates from a specific email campaign. More information on how to add UTM Tags to your emails.
• Above all, make sure that your emails look reputable and are well designed. If your emails do not look professional, some recipients may not trust your unsubscribe link and mark them as spam instead. It's best to avoid sales language, all caps, and excessive punctuation in your subject line.

Test your emails

Campaign checklist

You can run an inbox test when viewing your draft campaign from the campaign checklist by clicking Run inbox tests at the top of the screen.

You can also run an inbox test from the Campaigns area when viewing Overview or Drafts. Find the campaign you want to test, click on the three-dot menu for that campaign, then choose the Inbox tests option.

Most results will be returned within the first few minutes. There is no need to stay on the page or logged into your account while the test is running.

If you do need to come back later, you can return to the test results or run a new test via the same steps as above.

Manual testing

If you have access to different email clients, use the Send a test option from the campaign checklist to see how your campaign is rendered in each of them. For example, you can set up free email accounts at web-based clients and use the feature to send an email to those addresses.

To test other desktop or mobile email clients, ask friends or colleagues if they use different services and devices that you could send a test to. Ask them to take a screenshot of the campaign as it appears in their inbox and send it to you.

Clean up your email lists

• Set clear expectations when someone joins your email list. Tell them what types of emails they'll receive and how often they will receive them.
• Remove any email addresses from your email list that you have not received permission to send emails to. You will want to have explicit permission from everyone in your email list before sending them an email.
• Use confirmed opt-in for all of your subscriber lists. This provides proof that those making spam complaints are unwarranted. Here is an article that walks through how to set up confirmed opt-in when users sign up for your email list.
  

If you follow the above steps, then you can help ensure that your emails are not reported as spam.