Most email advertising web-applications track a complaint rate for each campaign or mailing-list. We use Mailchimp for PosterMyWall’s campaigns, which tracks the number of times an email is marked as spam. If the complaint rate goes above a certain percentage, Mailchimp sends a warning message.
A few months back, as our mailing-list grew we started seeing an increase in the amount of complaints per campaign. A vast majority of complaints were from Facebook-based users, who unlike email account users had not seen the ‘Send me promotions and updates via email’ checkbox when signing-up.
To fix this, we decided to add such a checkbox after the ‘login with Facebook’ flow. The dialog shown below would appear once a new user went through Facebook’s dialogs.
The checkbox in this dialog is checked by default. After this was rolled out, the initial couple of campaigns still had a high complaint rate, but as more newer users who’d gone through this dialog during the sign-up process were added to the list, the overall rate of complaints dropped.
I’m surprised I haven’t seen any other website, which integrates Facebook into their signup process, do something like this. Granted Facebook’s developer policy allows developers to send advertisement campaigns to email addresses fetched via the Graph, it’s still good to give the user the option to opt-out of newsletters and other advertisement campaigns.
If you’ve been in this position, I’d love to know how you handled high complaint rates specifically related to Facebook users.
Jaffer Haider 