When is affiliate marketing email considered spam and how does it impact deliverability?

Key findings

• Consent issues: A primary reason affiliate emails are flagged as spam is the questionable source of email addresses. Often, affiliates use purchased or scraped lists, leading to a high volume of unconsented mail.
• Brand reputation risk: When affiliates send spammy emails, the negative sender reputation extends to the brands they promote, impacting the primary brand's ability to reach the inbox with legitimate communications.
• Content and frequency: Overly promotional content, misleading subject lines, or excessive sending frequency from affiliates can trigger spam filters and increase complaint rates, regardless of initial consent.
• Monitoring difficulty: It is challenging for brands to oversee all affiliate email practices, especially when affiliates use rotating domains or obscure sending infrastructures.

Key considerations

• Clear guidelines: Brands should establish explicit email marketing guidelines for their affiliates, covering consent, content, and sending practices.
• Affiliate vetting: Thoroughly vet affiliates to ensure their marketing methods align with deliverability best practices and legal compliance, helping to avoid issues like a damaged domain reputation.
• Performance metrics: Monitor performance beyond sales conversions, focusing on email engagement metrics like open rates, click-through rates, and spam complaint rates to detect problematic affiliate behavior. According to a Kickbox blog on the impact of affiliate marketing, careful monitoring is key to preventing deliverability issues.
• Transparency: Ensure affiliates are transparent about their relationship with the brand and clearly state who is sending the email.

Key opinions

• Subjectivity vs. objectivity: Many marketers acknowledge that whether an email feels 'spammy' can be subjective, but objective metrics like complaints are undeniable indicators.
• Risk assessment: Affiliate marketing is often seen as a risky endeavor due to potential negative impacts on sender reputation and overall email deliverability. Companies must weigh the potential gains against the risks of getting blacklisted.
• Transparency issues: A common complaint is that affiliates are often secretive about their sending practices, using tactics like rotating domains and massive IP ranges without full disclosure.
• Hard sells: Emails that push a 'hard sell' rather than providing relevant information are more likely to be perceived as spam by recipients.

Key considerations

• Business goal alignment: Marketers should tie affiliate performance directly to business goals, evaluating if the trade-off for potential deliverability issues is worth the gains.
• Content relevance: Prioritize relevance in affiliate emails, ensuring links and offers genuinely align with recipient interests to avoid spam flags.
• Monitoring tactics: Implement robust monitoring for affiliate campaigns, looking for sudden surges in commissions that might indicate problematic sending practices.
• Recipient experience: Always consider the recipient's experience. If an email doesn't seem to come from a known source or feels unsolicited, it's likely to be marked as spam, impacting overall email deliverability.

Key opinions

• Complaints are key: For ISPs like Gmail, affiliate mail is considered spam if it generates complaints or exhibits other characteristics of unsolicited mail, regardless of the affiliate's claims of opt-in.
• Majority are spammers: Many experts assert that a vast majority of affiliates operate as actual spammers, acquiring addresses without genuine consent, often with flimsy pretexts.
• Brand reputation damage: Affiliate spam can lead to the brand's URLs being blocked, even for its own corporate and transactional emails. This means even a high sender reputation can be quickly eroded.
• Deceptive opt-in: Some affiliates employ highly questionable 'opt-in' claims, such as purchasing lists from companies that recipients allegedly opted into years ago, without maintaining records of such consent.

Key considerations

• Diligent monitoring: Brands must actively monitor emails sent by their affiliates, using tools like spam traps and mailbox monitoring to identify unsolicited mail, as detailed by a Mailkit blog on the dangers of affiliate marketing.
• Strict contracts: Implement contracts with affiliates that clearly define acceptable email sending practices and penalties for non-compliance, emphasizing that spam trap hits are unacceptable.
• Due diligence: Perform thorough due diligence on affiliate partners, understanding their list acquisition and sending methodologies before engagement.
• Long-term impact: Recognize that short-term gains from aggressive affiliate campaigns can lead to long-term deliverability damage that is difficult to repair, affecting all email marketing efforts. Learn how to address emails going to spam.

Key findings

• Consent is crucial: Documentation from ISPs and ESPs uniformly emphasizes that permission-based marketing is fundamental. Any email sent without clear, explicit, and verifiable consent is at risk of being flagged as spam.
• Sender responsibility: Brands are held accountable for the email practices of their affiliates. If an affiliate generates complaints or hits spam traps, the brand's deliverability suffers.
• Engagement signals: Low engagement rates (opens, clicks) and high negative feedback (spam complaints, unsubscribes) from affiliate traffic are strong indicators to mailbox providers that the emails are unwanted.
• Content quality: Documentation often advises against misleading subject lines, excessive promotional language, and cloaked URLs, all common in problematic affiliate campaigns.

Key considerations

• Monitoring Postmaster Tools: Documentation from Google and Yahoo highlights the importance of using their Postmaster Tools to monitor domain and IP reputation, spam rates, and other metrics that can be impacted by affiliate sending. Understanding your Google Postmaster Tools data is essential.
• Authentication standards: Mailbox providers emphasize the need for proper email authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) to verify sender identity and reduce spoofing, which is a common issue with unauthorized affiliate mail.
• Clear unsubscribe options: Ensure that all affiliate emails include clear and easy-to-use unsubscribe mechanisms to comply with regulations and mitigate complaints. This includes compliance with Gmail's new unsubscribe requirements.
• Policy adherence: Documentation often details specific acceptable use policies regarding third-party sending. Brands must ensure affiliates strictly adhere to these policies to maintain good standing.