Spam Complaints Fuelled By Poor Practice

There’s a thin line between perceptions of legitimate email and spam – just 1 percent difference, in fact.

That’s what the findings of the Digital Marketing Association’s Digital Tracker study looks like to me. When asked “What is most likely to prompt you to mark email as spam?” ten per cent of people responded “Products offered are illegal” and eleven percent said that it was because they had a “Lack of trust in brand concerned”

The research also suggests that legitimate senders of commercial email are encouraging spam complaints by simple poor email marketing practice. Just under “I suspect them of phishing attack” – the primary reason people reported emails as spam were examples of poor email marketing practice – “Too many (frequency)” and “Don’t remember signing up”.

The more spam complaints email campaigns receive, the more likely that emails from those senders won’t get delivered to the inbox in the future.

Marketers don’t need to be spammers to be perceived as spammers. They do need to follow email marketing best practice so the emails they send are valued by the people who receive them.

If you are a DMA member, you can read the full study results here.