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Understanding Feedback Loops
Feedback loops are a valuable tool for those conducting email marketing campaigns. When used properly, the information provided can help you keep your list clean and your reputation pristine.
What is an email feedback loop?
With the rise of spam, email providers like AOL, Yahoo! and Comcast decided to fight it by adding a handy little button to their email clients. With a click of this button, the recipient could label any email that he or she didn't like as spam, blocking it, and messages from the same address, from reaching the inbox. With all the hype about avoiding the unsubscribe buttons, the report as spam button became the lazy man's way of unsubscribing. Unfortunately, the senders paid the price doubly because the were marked as spammers and didn't know anything about the recipient's desire to be removed and therefore kept sending, getting in trouble with the remote ESP.
Out of the goodness of their heart, AOL decided to share the fact that an email was marked as spam with the senders of those emails, creating one of the first valuable feedback loops. The bulk email sender could now at least see when a message went awry due to an increase in spam complaints. Adjustments could be made to the message in order to make the message more valuable. Unfortunately, most FBL's don't give you the outright address so you can easily unsubscribe the user, you have to go through often tedious processes to find the right address to ensure you don't send to them again.
How do I use an email feedback loop?
The first thing to do is analyze your email list and determine if the percentage of emails you send to a particular domain makes it worth your time. If you don't send to very many public domains like AOL, Yahoo!, etc. there is no reason to sign up. If however, those email domains make up a large part of your list, you should consider signing up.
- First, find the list
- Follow their instructions to sign up, you need access to the postmaster or abuse account in your domian in most instances
- Monitor the email account you set up for the FBL and ensure you remove those addresses from your list
This last step is very tedious, even when using Campagin Enterprise. The email address of the complainer is not included due to privacy concerns. The best thing to do is to open the attached email, which is the original you sent, and unsubscribe them yourself.
Which feedback loop(s) should I sign up with?
AOL
Comcast
Windows Live Hotmail
Juno, Net Zero (also a whitelisting request).
Yahoo!
There may be others popping up at any time. Just do a search for email feedback loops every so often to stay abreast of new information.
While not a perfect system, monitoring the feedback loops is a necessary part of establishing and maintaining your email marketing reputation. Hopefully, the future will bring us easier to use options such as Gmail's attempt at including an unsubscribe request when being marked as spam. We'll have to see where this goes. Future releases of Campaign and Email Marketing Director will try to integrate this feature.
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