About spam complaints 👎
If you send out emails using Givebutter and multiple donors mark them as spam after they've been successfully delivered, your account may reach a spam threshold (or bounce threshold, if the emails are sent but consistently unable to be delivered).
Intended to combat unwanted emails, excessive spam complaints can be detrimental to legitimate senders like your organization. Unfortunately, what constitutes a spam email is not clear-cut – if a supporter receives an email that they don't trust, they may mark it as spam, regardless of the platform it was sent on, how it's designed, or the content it includes.
Ways to reduce complaints 📉
Keep in mind that recipients get to decide if a message appears to be spam or not. The following self-serve options may help to reduce spam complaints by your donor base or mailing list audience.
Proofread your emails 🔍
Review your email for typos, grammar issues, and missing punctuation. Check for clarity and make it concise. It's important to ensure that your message delivers a coherent message with a clear purpose and intention. Emails that include errors, an unclear message, disorganized formatting, or content that doesn't match the subject line are often marked as spam by recipients.
Clean up your mailing list 💌
Sending emails to an irrelevant (or out-of-date) audience will often result in unsubscribe requests, bounces, and spam complaints.
Ensure that your email list is specific and includes recipients with whom you've engaged recently (ie. within the past three months).
Send out emails to targeted groups of people. You can accomplish this by filtering your contacts before sending out your email. This can include donors to a specific campaign, people who have donated over a specified threshold, or donors with a recurring plan, to name a few options. If a contact consistently receives emails that do not apply to them, they are likely to mark it as spam.
Archive irrelevant, incorrect, or unused contacts on your account. If you are repeatedly sending emails to many invalid email addresses, this can flag your account as sending spam. If you'd like to keep the contact information but discontinue including them in emails, you can unsubscribe contacts in bulk.
Use merge tags 👤
Merge tags (also known as dynamic variables) allow you to automatically populate messages using a supporter's name without creating individualized emails. For example, you can use merge tags to address a donor by their full name instead of using a generic greeting. Personalized emails are less likely to be marked as spam.
Merge tags also support fallback values (defaults) that populate if merge tag data doesn't exist, so you don't have to worry about complete data for every contact in your account. Outbound email composer options + merge tags →
Set up DMARC 🔒
DMARC is an email security standard that allows domain owners to monitor who’s sending email using their domain and instructs email receivers to approve, quarantine, or reject emails that aren’t sent from a secure source. You can quickly set this up for free. Comply with Google and Yahoo's new email sender compliance rules →
Remove raw web links 🔗
If you're including URLs to your fundraising campaign, you'll want to ensure that they aren't raw links. A raw link (ie. "https://givebutter.com/c/mycampaign") is a direct/open URL to another webpage, however spam filters may flag emails including links like this.
Instead, create a text link in your email (ie. "click here to sign up") or use the built-in composer option to create a clickable call-to-action button. Not only does a styled link look more professional and aesthetically-pleasing, it may reduce spam complaints.
