Feedback loops

Feedback Loops – what they are and why your campaigns need to be in the loop

We've all heard stories of email spammers setting up their unsubscribe links so that rather than unsubscribing they are in fact submitting the recipient's verified email address for more spamming!

Distrust remains, and if your recipient wants to unsubscribe but doesn’t trust your unsubscribe link, they are just as likely to click the ‘Junk’ button in their inbox, believing this will unsubscribe them safely (here are the stats - 19% of recipients will click the 'Junk' button to unsubscribe).

Being reported as ‘junk’ is something you need to do all you can to avoid, because it will generate a spam complaint to the IPS and can lead to your marketing emails being filtered into ‘Junk’ boxes, or blocked.

The secret weapon – Feedback loops

Some email service providers (ESPs), in particular dotMailer, have access to a weapon in the fight to keep your email deliverability rate up and keep your marketing emails out of the Junk box.

A Feedback Loop (also known as FBL) allows the ISP to alert senders when their email has generated a spam complaint, enabling the sender to unsubscribe the complaining recipient, avoid repeat complaints and safeguard their sender reputation.

Why the secret?

FBLs are not well known about amongst marketers. And there’s a reason for this. ISPs restrict access to their FBLs to a limited group of email service providers and senders with an outstanding sender reputation.

It doesn’t take many ‘Junk’ or spam complaints for a sender to become blocked.  ISPs have differing complaint rate thresholds which they don’t release, but as a guideline, you should be aiming for no more than 1 complaint in 1000.

So it’s clear to see why it is so important to remove complaining recipients from your database as soon as you are alerted.

List cleaning and message testing

Acting on an FBL alert by cleaning your email database is essential.

dotMailer for example will automatically unsubscribe any FBL alerts generated by your email campaign from Hotmail or AOL.

But list cleaning isn’t the whole story. Marketers can analyse FBL alerts separately to their unsubscribes, to test and refine their subject lines and message content with the aim of getting their FBL alerts down as low as possible.

Monitoring FBL rates against particular email lists or groups of customers or prospects can highlight issues with your email targeting and messaging that need to be addressed.