Qualtrics - High Complaint Rate

What is a high complaint rate?

A high complaint rate especially for emails typically means anything over 0.1%, or about 1 complaint for every 1,000 emails sent. This can happen due to recipients marking your message as spam.

What can you do to prevent this before creating a Qualtrics panel?

It is considered best to ensure you have obtained consent to email the individuals on your list. 

For research purposes, if you’re using someone’s email list, it’s always a good idea to check with them about how their list is maintained. You should ask whether they regularly update the list by removing duplicate addresses, bounced email addresses, or people who consistently don’t engage. Also ask if they remove people who request to be taken off their list. They are required to remove an individual who requests to unsubscribe from an email list. Keeping the list clean improves send rates and reduces your complaint rate.

How do I remove duplicate email addresses in my list?

Create an excel sheet with all the email addresses and use the function to remove duplicates. (Select your data, go to the Data tab, click Remove Duplicates.)

How can I tell if I have a high complaint rate?

In Qualtrics you will see high complaint rate in red in the summary of the distribution (see the image below). If you click on the i icon beside the high complaint rate menu item it will give you the email service providers with high-complaint rates and how many emails were sent to those providers. When you have a high complaint rate you will not be able to send reminders to that list. If you click on the down arrow by how many emails were sent and download the history, you may be able to spot why some of the emails bounced. From there, you can create a new list. If the history shows the emails were successfully sent or opened, then those addresses are fine and don’t need to be included in the new listing.  

The distributions history will download as excel sheet. Filter it for Email Blocked, Email Hard Bounce, Email Soft Bounce.

A soft bounce indicates temporary issue like the inbox is full.

A hard bounce can mean:

• Normally smtp; 550 means that Qualtrics blacklisted them so you can ask them to release them from the blacklist by calling them.
• x-postfix; host or domain name not found would require you to look up the email address to find the correct host or domain.
• smtp; the email account that you tried to reach does not exist and would require you to look up the email address
• Email Blocked

Once an email is marked bounced the email will not be resent even after you get the blacklist removed so if your email was blacklisted, remove those addresses and add the emails to the new listing.

Wait 24 hours to send to the new list if you are using the same subject line. Qualtrics views it as a duplicate email if you use the same subject within the same 24-hour time period.  

Duplicate messages - if you can find which email addresses were not sent, mark them as opt-out in your list so the email will not go out again to those individuals in the reminders you send.