Using messages to send marketing campaigns to customers.
Seems that some customers have marked our email as spam although they signed up to our email.
just noticed that although they marked an email as spam, they have not been unsubscribed, so they are still being emailed even though I have chosen not to market people that are not subscribed to our email marketing.
Surely, if an email recipient marks an email as spam, they should be unsubscribed?
Absolutely not. When you mark as spam, all you’re doing is telling your email provider to filter that email into the spam folder. That’s it. Has nothing to do with your relationship with the sender. If you want to unsubscribe, you need to go through the unsubscribe channels that sender put in place.
That said, some email providers like Gmail will try to associate the email with legitimate email lists, and provide an additional action (Unsubscribe) when marking as spam. Not all email providers will do this and even the ones that do, don’t or can’t do it to every email ever sent to the spam folder.
What you as a merchant need to do is make your Unsubscribe link very visible in the emails you send. That will lessen the chance you are demoted to the spam folder, and it will be a good sign and make it easier for platforms like Gmail to detect it.
You should also be looking at your analytics and not sending emails to people who obviously never open them.
Maximus3 nailed the technical side. But there’s a practical risk here worth knowing about.
When customers mark your email as spam, even if they don’t unsubscribe on your end, their email provider is keeping score. If your spam complaint rate goes above 0.3% (Gmail’s threshold is actually 0.1%), your entire sending domain starts getting penalized. That means even your order confirmations and shipping updates can end up in spam folders for everyone, not just the people who complained.
Shopify’s built-in messaging doesn’t have great visibility into spam complaints. If you’re doing marketing campaigns at any real volume, you’re better off with Shopify Email or something like Klaviyo. These tools plug into email provider feedback loops and will automatically suppress addresses that report spam, so you don’t keep sending to people who already flagged you.
Quick wins to keep your complaint rate low: keep your subject lines honest, include a visible unsubscribe link near the top of the email not buried at the bottom, and regularly clean out subscribers who haven’t opened anything in 90+ days. Sending to a dead list is the fastest way to tank your deliverability.
What volume are you sending and how often? That’ll help figure out if this is a one-off thing or a systemic issue.
@DavinBrewbitz look like technical issues, can you please let me know which email marketing app your are using.. I think you have to connects with app tech support.. may be