The NonProfit Times has a great article on what to do if your company receives complaints about bulk emailing. Although the article is aimed at non-profits, the information is useful to all kinds of companies and organizations.  Here’s an excerpt:

Even if your organization follows best practices, you may occasionally do something that triggers a spike in spam complaints. This is most commonly caused by gaps in permission-based list building practices or unwelcome changes in message frequency or content. A good email service provider will offer you tools for mitigating the impact of mistakes like this on your overall email delivery.

For example, emails that have been organically acquired following strict permission-based practices are much less likely to generate spam complaints than addresses that have been added via append services. If your email service provider can segment your mail stream by the permission basis of intended recipients, any spikes in spam complaints from lower quality lists can be insulated from the mail resources used to send to your core house file.

This is an excellent article. These days, when  sending out bulk emails from your company you need to be very very careful. Make sure you are following all the requirements of the CAN-SPAM act, and also review your emails to make sure the subject lines don’t contain words or phrases commonly associated with spam as they will be sure to trigger a spam filter, or worse, a blacklist somewhere along the line. Email can be a valuable tool for your company but you must exercise caution and care when using it.