Complaints Cost You Money

Reposted from the Bronto Blog.

By now, most email marketers have probably come to understand that
sending email is not without risk.  As with any marketing, knowing your
audience and serving up something that will entice them to convert is
key.  Two methods email recipients have to let you, as a marketer, know
they don't like what you've sent them is by either unsubscribing or
lodging a complaint with their ISP (largest still is Yahoo! with 106MM unique US inboxes according to the latest report).

Note, these are not representative of recipients (your potential or
existing customers) telling you they don't care or are indifferent to
what you've sent them.  But, rather, they've gone out of their way to
deliberately tell someone they don't appreciate the email (either you,
directly via the unsubscribe or the ISP via a complaint).

Let's dive into the complaints a bit more, though.  These little
bits of data a recipient fires off to their ISP or 3rd party service
(like SpamCop) have two effects:

1. It signifies to the ISP that a subscriber of theirs has identified
   what she considers to be spam.  When these are added up over time and
   the recipient base, that ISP domain can begin blocking the sender.
2. It is compiled in the email platform you're using and usually, like with Bronto's Sender Rating, can impact your ability to send email out.  Also, that recipient is unsubscribed from future mailings until they re-optin.

At its core, a spam complaint is a person raising their hand and saying "Yuck."

How do you measure complaints? Based on the above effects,
there's real money being left on the table after every complaint is
lodged.  It not only affects the LTV (define) but also shows the value of your program as determined by the aggregate of the recipients' reactions.

Start Simple. If you don't yet have a way to assign a
monetary value to a complaint, take it slow.  Look at your marketing
spreadsheets or your data warehouse (or wherever you keep the
incremental value listed per customer/prospect, even if it's on a legal
pad somewhere) and ask yourself "How much will it cost me when one
person tells me they don't want any more email?"  Is it $10?  $5?  If
you have really high incremental revenue per item, it may be more.  If
you're about providing a more informational email, it will be much
lower.  But at some point, you need to define how many net dollars will
come out of your budget each time a new recipient tells you "No!"

Stay consistent. Once you've got the value down, be sure to
apply it to all recipients across the board fairly.  You can break down
the values per mailing segment, but in my experience, it's more
effective to have the opportunity cost assigned multilaterally.  Makes
it much easier to compare one campaign to the next within your campaign.

Be true to yourself. The whole point of email marketing in
the first place is to spread the word about your company, service or
product, right?  Pay attention to complaints coming in (of which any
good email platform should expose) and act on this information. 
Turning a blind eye or accepting the complaints as collateral damage
for emailing will result in potentially alienating your recipients. 
And, with that individual, you'll lose their willingness in the future
to even get your email.

Don't be afraid of complaints; embrace them.  The spam complaint
isn't going anywhere soon.  Many ISPs still use it at as the glue tying
senders to email performance, recipients are being trained more and
more to just "spam it" from their own web or thick clients, and
successful marketers know exactly how much a complaint drives out of
their potential success in dollars.  Take action when receiving them
and use your marketing savvy to avoid more in the future.

I'll leave you with this thought…

39% of all respondents said they used the "report spam" button often or very often. – MarketingSherpa "Email Marketing Benchmark Guide 2008"

Chris Wheeler
Director of Deliverability at Bronto
@ChrisAWheeler

Last 5 posts by Chris Wheeler

• What the !#$@ do I do with the headers? - April 19th, 2010
• Where the !#$@ are the headers? - March 29th, 2010
• Deliverability Forum: It's a Wrap! - January 11th, 2010
• Cultural Bias: A Discussion Around ISP and ESP Relations - December 17th, 2009
• Future of Deliverability: A Series - November 16th, 2009