What your subscribers are telling you

When sending out your emails, it is important to realize that you aren’t the only person judging the success of your campaign. The ISPs and recipients are also making their own judgment calls. Some of the feedback that your recipients give you is positive in the form of clicks and opens. There are other types of feedback though, and these come in the form of unsubscribes, complaints, and bounces. Most of the major ISPs have feedback loops available for senders to monitor these other types of feedback.

Feedback loops are essentially a mechanism that ISPs use to let senders know when a subscriber has complained. They come in a variety of formats. Some contain no more information than the email address of the complainer, others contain the entire mail with complete header information, and still others scrub any identifying information from the headers of emails to ensure that you don’t engage in list washing. Hallmark Data Systems works to ensure that all available feedback loops are in place on your IPs. We have established feedback loops with AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail/MSN, usa.net, Excite, and United Online.

Every list is going to have a few complaints. Some people complain merely as a means of unsubscribing, but most are actually using it as a means to let you know that something has happened that they don’t like. They could be telling you that the unsubscribe mechanism is too difficult to use or broken. According to a recent Return Path study 33% of users try to use the unsubscribe link first and 12% only complain as a last resort of unsuccessful unsubscribe attempts. They could also be telling you that they are receiving more email than they expected. It should be clear when subscribers opt in that they know how often they will be hearing from you.

It's a good idea to look at patterns in your complaints, since this can provide valuable information. Complaints can spawn from poor acquisition practices, irrelevant content, difficult, strict, or broken unsub mechanisms, or sending emails too frequently. It is important to track down the sources of complaints. Complaints leave a bad taste in the mouth of the complainer (and in the ear of anyone they tell) that tarnishes your brand, as well as diminish the size and effectiveness of your list. Also, when your complaint rates are elevated, your emails are more likely to be blocked. By looking for patterns in your complainers, you gain insight into the sources of those complaints and ultimately can stop the complaints before they start. Any data points that see high percentages of complainers, whether it is specific content, address acquisition source, frequency, etc., can tell you about potential problems you may need to address. If it is a problem with frequency or acquisition source, it may be as simple as a need to update the opt in language to set subscriber expectations. Hallmark Data Systems can make reports available to our clients that address many of these issues as well as others. For further information about these or other reports please contact your account manager.