Report spam buttons: do not panic

You may have seen a flurry of excitement concerning the results of a survey by Q Interactive and MarketingSherpa on consumer perceptions of spam and the "report spam" button (as reported by DMNews).

In brief, a fair number of consumers define spam essentially as email they don't want, irrespective of whether they signed up for it or not. And a good number see the "report spam" button as a substitute for the unsubscribe button.

Given the big role played by spam complaints in determining your sender reputation and thus your ability to get email delivered, there is some understandable Panic (with a capital P).

Is your email getting blocked because people lose interest and hit the spam button instead of bothering to unsubscribe?

Well, hang on. Let's look at this rationally. (And let's assume the survey has no methodological flaws.)

First, this should not be news. As far back as May 2007, the big webmail services began making it clear that their definition of spam was "unwanted email."

As such, then, their users are using the report spam button exactly as intended by those who provide that feature: to report unwanted email. We may not like it, but that's the way it is. Like Al says, it's a feature, not a bug.

And other consumer surveys have long revealed similar consumer email attitudes.

In January, 2008, a ReturnPath survey found that "...subscribers do not hesitate to complain about unwanted messages (reporting the email as spam)."

And back in May 2007, Epsilon reported that two-thirds of those using spam complaint mechanisms "...equate reporting spam with unsubscribing from marketers' email programs."

Spam has always been defined by the recipient. Always. And if that definition is essentially "unwanted" or "irrelevant" email, then email marketers must accept it and adapt to it.

If that harsh reality seems like a daunting proposition, consider this...

If consumers were so trigger happy about reporting anything and everything as spam, then we'd all be on blacklists. Clearly we're not: good emails are still getting delivered.

As Laura puts it in a great post on this very topic..."send relevant mail that your recipients want to receive. If you do this, then you will not have delivery problems."

Quite.

Having said that there is some recognition from ISPs (like Google) that not all spam reports are equal. And that spam reports for "real" spam and spam reports as unsubscribes should be treated differently.

Which is why there are moves afoot to allow webmail services to display secure unsubscribe buttons the same way they display report spam buttons. See this website for details. And anti-spam vendor Cloudmark recently announced a "Secure Unsubscribe" feature.

But even if this becomes widespread, don't think you're off the hook. There are already indications that ISPs will look at unsubscribe rates and other interactions with your email to determine whether they're wanted (or not wanted, i.e. can be treated as spam).

The message is clear. However much we might talk about definitions of spam, permission, buttons etc. etc., if your email is not engaging the interest of your recipients then your deliverability will suffer.

So there are two lessons to draw out of this...

First, the survey is yet another wake up call to get out your big book of best practices and get to work. Check out the ideas at the end of Denise Cox's latest post for some starting points.

Second, we need a change of attitude to unsubscribes.

They are not bad news anymore.

Any unsubscribe request you receive directly is one less disinterested person who might later report you as spam. Unsubscribes are, in a sense, something to welcome.

Loren McDonald has some tips on optimizing the unsubscribe process and you'll find other articles here.

Also consider taking eROI's survey on the topic, which might reveal some insights we can all use.

So no panic required, but there's hard work ahead...

More on deliverability | Tags: email marketing, email deliverability, webmail, spam, anti-spam

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