SPAM complaints can hurt your sender reputation and your overall deliverability stats, so finding strategic ways to avoid these complaints is essential.
Follow these guidelines to help clean up your contact list:
1) When importing a list from another system, make sure that you remove or identify your "unsubscribes" from your previous database.
More than likely, in your other database, you had unsubscribes and individuals who had bad email addresses that bounced, along with some who may have marked you as SPAM. These contacts need to be removed from the list, or imported with an appropriate tag so you can exclude these contacts from sends and avoid more bounces and unsubscribes.
2) Check your list for contacts that have not interacted with you in over 6 months.
If someone has not interacted with you (read: opened or clicked through your emails) in over 6 months, removing them from your list will help your open rates. User engagement is a major factor in filtering decisions. Gmail and others will evaluate both a user’s engagement with their mailbox in general and their engagement with a specific sending domain to determine what to deliver. If they have interacted with you regularly you are more likely to get those messages placed in their inbox.
3) Verify that you have permission to email everyone on your list.
Check your list for contacts who did not opt-in before importing them into BenchmarkONE, you may consider sending a reminder email with an additional opt-in to ensure your contacts are still interested in hearing from you.
Check out this article on Avoiding the SPAM folder for some additional helpful hints.
If you're ready to start importing, follow these guides: