The following was posted on a Facebook Group:
We need help on a system email delivery issue we have, wondering if any of you have solved this.
We’re an automated webinar solution. Our customers are webinar hosts, and their customers sign up for webinars which they watch on our platform.
Webinar attendees get event confirmation, reminders, and follow ups.
We use Amazon SES as a platform to send these emails on behalf of our customers.
When webinar attendees click “spam”, it’s sending our complaints reputation slightly above 0.5 which is causing Amazon to red flag our account.
The problem is, we have no control over these emails, and assume some people click “spam” almost as a delete button.
Why someone would click spam on a confirmation email after they register for an event? We have no idea. But we’re sending tens of thousands of emails per day to consumers and 0.5 is not a lot of wiggle room.
We talked to Amazon and they have no solution. Their enforcement team is unreachable. Their engineers don’t know how to solve this, and said we just have to expect it to be higher because we’re a platform.
The worry is they’ll turn off our service without warning and we can’t get a hold of them quickly.
Has anyone here solved this? Is there another mail service we should look into? Any suggestions would be hugely appreciated!!
Here’s my response:
I’m assuming you have SES SPF and DKIM nailed down, there are two issues at play here.
Issue #1 – Some people simply don’t pay attention when subscribing to lists. There is nothing you can do. It is what it is.
Issue #2 – There is a lack of consistency. This you can fix this by doing the following:
Step #1 – After the visitor opts in, take them to a page that displays, in large print, “Thank you for subscribing to _________ . You’ll receive an email shortly. Please click the link in the email to verify your subscription.” Blank is the specific name of the newsletter/mailing list, etc.
Step #2 – Use double opt in.
Step #3 – Use a real person as the email sender.
Step #4 – Every email that goes out has a header that reads “You subscribed to ______ on ______ from IP address _________. If you no longer want to receive these emails, please unsubscribe by clicking this link.” The first blank is the specific name of the newsletter/mailing list, etc. The second blank is the date they subscribed. The third blank is their IP when they subscribed.
Step #4 -Every email that goes out has a footer that reads “You subscribed to ______ on ______ from IP address _________. If you no longer want to receive these emails, please unsubscribe by clicking this link.” The first blank is the specific name of the newsletter/mailing list, etc. The second blank is the date they subscribed. The third blank is their IP when they subscribed.
Of course, you can modify the wording as you see fit.
I know many “Marketers” are totally against making the unsubscribe link obvious. Some even bury it down 80 lines so you really have to dig for it.
My “radical” thought is you want to send emails to only those people who want them. You also want to keep Spam reports to a minimum. This calls for a bold unsubscribe link.
In the end, it is impossible to fix the first issue. But, you can minimize the second issue.