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Investigating the root causes behind your risk profile. Why are they unsubscribing? People will unsubscribe no matter how good the offer or clever the creative. Names in the zero to three month range typically have a lower unsubscribe rate than names in the four to six or seven to nine month ranges. Based on the blue line in the chart, you can see that this middle age group is actively unsubscribing. This may be because they have acquired the product or service they need and may no longer be as engaged with your messages as they were in their information gathering stages.

As customers in the continuum age and transform from recent to older clients, it can be inferred that you've built a positive rapport, loyalty and a high lifetime value with those customers. But the difference in terms of unsubscribes/complaints/bad addresses between segments should prompt responsible marketers to ask pointed questions to shed light on why and how these differences occur:

• Is it the way that names have been acquired?
• Are communications being tailored to fit the age of the segment?
• Am I reviewing unsubscribes/complaints/bad addresses by age of name in my database to isolate how I'm impacting segments through my messaging strategy?

Why are they complaining? Permission levels. The first and most obvious reason customers may report your e-mails as spam to their ISPs is that they didn't actually give you explicit permission to e-mail — or forgot they did. At this point, it may be time to revisit your definition vs. your customers' definition of explicit permission.

Questionable identity. A second important reason is that your customer may not recognize that the e-mail is from you. Vanity from-addresses, non-descriptive subject lines, and image-blocking all work to your disadvantage.

Today it's just as important to sell the content of the e-mail as it is to ensure your company brand is clearly recognizable. Do so by ensuring your company is identifiable in either the from line or subject line of the e-mail, and that your content does not require images-on to convey your brand and key calls to action.

Report spam buttons. Unfortunately, regardless of how well crafted your message or universal your brand, someone will complain. To understand why complaints may occur even when you follow a clear opt-in acquisition strategy, it's necessary to understand the report-as-spam button.

Abuses of non-functioning e-mail unsubscribe mechanisms prompted consumer distrust of mailers' unsubscribe options. ISPs, forced to come up with a tool that would allow recipients to help them identify illegitimate mailers and prevent further messaging abuses, introduced the report-as-spam button. These are now a highly visible and easy-to-use feature in most major e-mail readers. Consumers use it not only to report real or suspected spam, but also as an alternative to the unsubscribe option provided by the mailer.

While it is impossible to avoid spam complaints alltogether, feedback loops offered by many ISPs give mailers the ability to quickly remove users from their active list and prevent subsequent complaints. But if an ISP or domain offers a feedback loop — and you haven't signed up for it — then complaints will continue to mount and so, too, will the probability that the ISP will revoke your right to mail any customer at their domain

How old is too old? Some ISPs will say any address that hasn't responded in six months should never be mailed again. The only way to answer this question is to grab hold of your monitor and peer deep into the soul of your database.

As complaints and unsubscribes taper off, the specter of bad addresses replaces them. In the oldest segments we see an increase in bad addresses as people change e-mail addresses/jobs/ISPs and so on.

Old segments pose the greatest threat of being blocked because they're most likely to have the highest numbers of complaints and bad addresses; combined volumes of both are a clear and present danger to an ISP striving to protect its users (your customers) from phishers and spammers. Such as ISP is likely to block a mailer who is not proactive in removing complaints and bad addresses.

Once you have established which segments are generating more complaints and bounces than opens and clicks, you should ascertain where these e-mail addresses originated. Can you account for the source or method of acquisition? If not, you may consider putting them back where you found them.

How old is too old, you might ask again? Too old is anything that you can't account for in terms of its provenance — and those generating higher numbers of bounces and complaints when compared to your most active and recent segments.

How can I send less e-mail and still meet my business goals? If the idea behind more equals less is rooted in the nature and mode of your communication with your clients, there are definite paths to achieving greater ROI. Here are three: