Aweber is an awesome email marketing and email auto responder service and we highly recommend it. Folks at Aweber ensure that your email never lands into somebody’s spam box/bulk folder even if you are sending your email newsletters to several thousand subscribers.
The problem arises when your subscribers start reporting your emails as spam using buttons like “Report As Spam” found in Gmail . Any such report is considered a complaint by Aweber and they have strict policies regarding the acceptable complaint rates. Any campaign that you send should always have a complaint rate of less than 0.1%.
Quoting Aweber –
If it is a one-off incident it’s fine but if your campaigns often result in complaint rates > 0.1% then you may be in some trouble with Aweber, so much so that your entire email list or account may get flagged.
What I did after receiving a complaint rate of more than 0.1%?
Once my Aweber campaign complaint rate shot-up to 0.12%. (marked in yellow below)
After that, as you can see I am receiving a rate of 0.0%. Here is my analysis of what went wrong and how I corrected it.
- Even if you have double-optin set up for your list, people tend to forget if they have subscribed to your list and straightaway hit that spam button. Make sure to regularly communicate with your list members or at least have some auto responders going at regular frequency once they join.
- If you have to send a campaign after a big time gap, write some thing like this at the top of your email.(and believe me this was the single reason how I managed to bring the complaint rate down)
Before I get started, just want to remind you that you’re receiving this email since you have opted to get notified of tech related tips in the past on my website http://ReviewOfWeb.com/ In case you don’t want to receive these emails, you can unsubscribe yourself by clicking the unsubscribe link at the bottom of this email.
- Though Aweber provides you the facility to switch to single-optin email but you should refrain from doing that. With single-optin any mischief monger can insert unwanted emails in your list and ultimately you could be penalized for spam reporting.
- Last but not the least , don’t insert huge amount of spaces between your last sentence and the place where unsubscribe link starts. I see many internet marketers do this. If someone wants to unsubscribe let him go and help him by making sure your unsubscribe link is placed at a convenient location.
Over to you. How do you keep your complaint rates down?
Ankur Jain is a Software Engineer in Test Automation. After a 5 years stint with Accenture and Oracle, he started his eLearning company. A long-time blogger and proud owner of the "Learn" series of websites. 
We actually put the following at the top:
Subscribed with [email protected] on Sep. 9, 2011. Unsubscribe
The unsubscribe is right there at the top, so if they really want to, they can unsub right there.
Even following AWeber’s best practice guide, we get weird complain levels from time to time.
>>Even following AWeber’s best practice guide, we get weird complain levels from time to time.
Yes that’s part of business, you really can’t help that 🙂
I’m definitely going to start putting why and how they subscribed at the top of the e-mail if it’s been awhile, never thought of that!
great tip,
Zach
Yes – I’m going to do the same 🙂