Tyler,

Great to see someone from marketing involved, and your reply above seems reasonable. But that is NOT what I just found your Acceptable Use Policy to say.

Your Policy is actually far worse then the click through message JManna posted above as it clearly states that you have "Zero Tolerance" policy, and that users will be charged $50 per complaint regardless of circumstances with only ONE free complaint per month.

This is a far different policy then the example I posted above from AWeber, a system that many here probably upgraded to Infusionsoft from.

If your recent changes are in preparation to begin enforcing that draconian policy, expect to not have a single customer left when you are done. As you note above it simply isn't realistic to get no complaints. I see no way to resolve the issue where someone requests a report, double opts in, and then clicks the spam button to unsubscribe.

Hopefully you can take the lead on getting your policy rewritten to industry norms. Email deliverability is important to us too. Help us do it - reasonably.

P.S. I did get one contact from Infusion a while back re: Spam complaints after a particularly big email blast. It was NOT a phone call, it was an email. It said I had 24 hours to respond with a long list of details or my service would be turned off. Really funny part was that I received it only shortly after an Infusion employee goofed when recovering my server instance after a failure, double billed over 100 customers ($6000 in refunds were required), and lost 100's of records which was never recovered. Needless to say we had our hands full dealing with that. Was anything BUT proactive, or helpful.

Thanks for clarifying which notice you were referring to.

I too was a bit concerned over the harsh tone it communicated. Totally admit, it wasn't a soft message. I've shared such feedback with our Email Compliance Team, so they can off the message on a good note instead of a bunch of "Don't do this."

Regardless, there would have been these concerns either way only because they aren't comfortable with the policies themselves. The fact is, NOTHING changed since 2006(!). We're in frequent discussions about giving a a good healthy update to our AUP to better reflect our intent, instead of getting into fiery debates on the topic. I empathize with you, our customers, but I also empathize with our Email Compliance Team who have to repeatedly deal with irresponsible marketers who threaten your deliverability.

I posted a detailed response to several of the questions that you've provided on our blog. Please check it out and share your feedback there:

http://www.infusionblog.com/company-info/spam-got-you-down-we-dont-like-spam/

My apologies we didn't communicate this better. =/

Thanks,
Joe

I agree that Aweber has a much better written and stated policy for abuse. It is unacceptable to me that I am without warning FORCED to agree to the policy (without the ability to even read the full policy first--no link, it was say yes or ...) or lose my right to use Infusionsoft entirely. That would be fine except I paid a HUGE entry fee for this software.

Between their ridiculous policy of including a "want to report this as spam" message when someone chooses to opt-out, and now this "agree or else" message, I'm not happy.

Kathryn,

We are looking out for all our clients, including you, when we ask opted-out recipients if they think your message is spam.

I'll let you know that we're revising our AUP very soon. We'll communicate advanced updates well-before they are in effect. Again, nothing changed in the notice now. It's an awareness campaign intended to remind our users of the rules already in effect.

Essentially, when an account is identified as an abuser, we perform the same activity as AWeber. We don't want to encourage or imply that complaint rates get "customer solution" calls. High complaint rates are a major risk to the company and we need our clients to respect that too.

Like I said, we're still evaluating the upcoming changes in the AUP/TOS, in addition to a full suite of FAQs and communications for clients and prospects.

At any time, anyone may decline their acceptance to the AUP by simply contacting our customer support team and informing them you wish to discontinue service. We don't place customers in contracts, so it's a take it or leave it option for them.

Oh yeah, wanted to mention. If one clicks "No Way," it would just log them out. No instant-termination... sorry for the worry.

I hope this helps. Let me know if you have questions. My email address is joseph.manna (at) infusionsoft.com.

~Joe

We are looking out for all our clients, including you, when we ask opted-out recipients if they think your message is spam.

I absolutely disagree with this. You "invite" people to say, "oh, sure, that was spam," when it could not have been due to their already being double opted-in.

At any time, anyone may decline their acceptance to the AUP by simply contacting our customer support team and informing them you wish to discontinue service. We don't place customers in contracts, so it's a take it or leave it option for them.

And we lose the multiple thousand dollar fee we paid to use InfusionSoft in the first place. Take it or leave it? Not cool.

I understand the reasoning for the option to report spam. However, I think if the person opts out that should be good enough.

Example:

We have a client who is an eye doctor that purchases our Peachtree Accounting software upgrades every year from us.

He opted out out of receiving emails and used the yes/no button to report us as spam. Now I can understand if he didn't like us anymore but he is Dolores's (wife and a CMAC) "COUSIN".

When we asked him about it he said: Well, I was cleaning out my inbox and I just started opting out of everything to stop the emails. I didn't realise it was you since I also get a lot of junk from Peachtree to upgrade as well.

I do feel that the spam yes/no should be reconsidered.

Joe

JNorcott - I agree I'm finding the majority of my "complaints" aren't SPAM at all, but simply Opt-Outs with feedback.

That said I actually really like that Infusionsoft asks the users for feedback. I'm finding it really helpful as I dig into it.

But I think it should be reworded - with multiple choice user options with some treated as spam complaints, and others treated as feedback.

Choices like:

* I never requested information from this company (SPAM)
* Emails too frequent (FEEDBACK)
* Information not what I requested (FEEDBACK)
* No longer interested (FEEDBACK)
* I previously unsubscribed and emails did not stop (FEEDBACK)
* ETC....

Double opted-in users should not have the SPAM option at all - they clearly requested the info at some point, and confirmed it.

If Infusion really wanted to go for the gold on this, they'd let us assign actions to the various feedback items once received.

Finally feedback shouldn't be included in the complaint report, or at least it should be filter-able.

Question: How do you determine if a SPAM complaint in the status search was through an ISP, rather than this ill-conceived Infusion form?

tgarns wrote:
Another point of clarification: You don't get a strike for each individual spam complaint. Your strikes come from your spam complaint RATE. If you rate gets too high, you'll get a strike. The comment above about avoiding spam complaints completely is right now. If you're doing a fair amount of email marketing, you're likely to get some complaints, because some people are just complainers. That's why we look more at spam complaint RATE, than the number of complaints.

Does that help?

It will help me sleep better at night seeing that in the AUP instead of the current wording like section 3.1.

Sean,

Great idea. I am working on getting that very change implemented in the near future along with a better report.

Here is how it would work (theoretically).

- Customer receives an email
- Customer clicks opt-out link
- Customer specifies opt out preference
- following page prompts user as to why they are opting out

That information then gets fed into a report that you are able to run whenever you want to see why people are opting out.

Love the idea about tying actions to the specific types on opt-out. Hadn't even thought of that but it would be perfect.

Brad