====== Abuse ======

When you send bulk email there is a chance that you may receive abuse complaints. These complaints are caused when a recipient clicks the spam button in their email client and Sentori receives a notification from their email provider. This abuse complaint is then displayed in your KPI Report and the contact is automatically unsubscribed from future emails.

===== What abuse means =====

Your Sentori account has a sender reputation which is monitored by the organisations that you are trying to send email to (e.g. Yahoo!, Google, etc). When people open and click your emails, your reputation goes up; emails can be delivered more quickly and there's less chance of them going into spam folders. If people don't open and click your emails, or worse click the spam button, your sender reputation goes down; emails can be delivered much more slowly and there's a higher chance of them going straight to someone's spam folder.

===== Why you get abuse complaints =====

There are many reasons why someone might flag your email as spam and you should watch this number closely: it can drastically influence how successfully and quickly future email campaigns can be delivered. 

Some possible reasons why you may receive spam complaints include:

  * Low quality or irrelevant content
  * You are sending too frequently
  * When you acquired the email address you were not clear on your intentions to market to it, e.g. hiding or obscurring terms and conditions
  * Their permission was not explicitly given for you to send them emails, in other words you are in fact spamming them
  * They couldn't find your email's unsubscribe link, perhaps it was intentionally hidden in small text in your email's footer
  * What is an acceptable spam rate?

Any time one of your email campaigns yields an abuse rate of 0.1% or higher, it will be investigated by our team. Repeated campaigns over this threshold will result in account suspension.

===== How to reduce abuse complaints =====

There are some basic steps you can easily carry out yourself:

  * Place an unsubscribe link in your email's header or pre-header; don't make it hard to find, people might click the spam button because it's easier than unsubscribing.
  * Carry out a full audit of your data acquisition strategies. It's not enough to just be on the right side of the law; the more explicit you are about your marketing intentions, the less likely you are to receive complaints from people who think you do not have permission to email them.
  * Ensure your signup form sends a welcome email when someone joins your list. The welcome email should thank them for signing up and also setup expectations about the emails they will receive -- content, frequency, etc.
  * Take a look at your [[email-unsubscribes-report|Unsubscribe Report]] and find out why people leave your mailing lists; it might be for the same reasons people are flagging your emails as spam.