In email marketing, maintaining a high sender reputation is everything. Employing email deliverability tools, such as Warmy.io, and Feedback Loops (FBL) have immense contributions to boost email success rate.
These tools enable email marketers to acquire valuable insights from mailbox providers — and how their recipients engage with their emails —, giving them the opportunity to reduce spam complaints, optimize email campaigns, and improve overall sender reputation.
But what exactly are FBLs? And how do they contribute to enhancing email deliverability, and what exactly does it do to improve email engagement?
For this blog post, we will take a deeper look at the concept of Feedback Loops, the meaning behind it, and the key differences between positive and negative feedback loops.
What Are Feedback Loops (FBL)?
Prominent mailbox providers, such as Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook provide Feedback Loop that sends notifications from senders if their recipients mark their emails as spam, or send them to junk.
It is a vital feature that informs senders to identify problematic email practices that email marketers and casual senders can address. This gives them the ability to adjust their email practices and alter their email marketing strategies.
How Does a Feedback Loop Work?
Usually, a sender would need to register to an FBL service with their email provider. This will prompt the email provider to send a “complaint report” back to the sender when a recipient marks or sends an email as spam.
This can provide the sender with the ultimatum to either remove the complaining user off of their email list, or adjust their email strategy.
Explaining Positive and Negative Feedback Loops in Email Marketing
When you receive a complaint report this usually means that your email has a negative impact on the receiver. However, feedback loops are not limited to complaints or a recipient sending an email to spam. Feedback loops can also provide positive classification.
Positive Feedback Loops
A positive feedback loop refers to recipient actions that indicate engagement and interest in an email campaign. This can boost or strengthen the sender’s reputation and improve email deliverability. It is also a clear indication that your emails follow the proper email etiquettes and confirms that your email marketing efforts are working.
Some examples of Positive Feedback Loops includes:
- Recipients Regularly Opening emails
- Clicking on links within the email
- Replying to emails
- Marking emails as important or moving them to the primary inbox
- Adding the sender to the address book
Positive engagement from the recipient helps email service providers to recognize the sender as legitimate, this reduces or eliminates the possibility of future emails being marked as spam, or blacklisted.
How to Encourage Positive Feedback Loops:
- Personalize subject lines and email content to match recipient preferences.
- Employing email header best practices.
- Use engaging CTAs (Call-to-Actions) to encourage interaction.
- Segment your audience based on their past behavior to send relevant content.
- Optimize send times for when recipients are most likely to engage.
Negative Feedback Loops
A negative feedback loop is the opposite of a positive feedback loop. It occurs when recipients take actions that indicate any form of dissatisfaction with the sender’s email. This is something that most email marketers and senders avoid as it leads to lower deliverability and significantly damages the sender reputation.
Some Examples of Negative Feedback Loops:
- Marking an email as spam or junk
- Unsubscribing from an email list
- Ignoring emails consistently
- Reporting the sender as a scammer or fraud
- Mailbox providers automatically filtering emails into spam
A high number of spam complaints or low engagement rates can signal to mailbox providers that the sender is not following best email practices, leading to email deliverability issues.
How to Reduce Negative Feedback Loops:
- Only send emails to engaged subscribers who have explicitly opted in.
- Provide an easy unsubscribe option to avoid spam complaints.
- Avoid misleading subject lines that trick users into opening emails.
- Monitor engagement metrics and remove inactive subscribers.
- Use double opt-in methods to ensure the recipient is genuinely interested in receiving emails.
- Gain additional knowledge: Try to understand some email marketing terms, or address potential SMTP errors.
How Feedback Loops Improve Email Deliverability
Feedback loops contribute to the maintenance of a healthy sender reputation and improve email deliverability. Implementing this in your email marketing strategy can help you address some potential email issues, and act on recipient feedback. Here is the detailed breakdown of using FBL effectively.
Reduces Spam Complaints
FBLs provide senders with the notification that their emails are marked as spam. This will allow businesses, or email marketers to implement corrective actions or other preventive measures and take immediate action to unsubscribe or suppress users who frequently complain, reducing future spam complaints.
Maintain a Clean Email List
FBL data supplies analytics to help businesses identify and remove disengaged subscribers. It enables proper lead generation capabilities and ensures that emails are sent only to active and interested recipients.
Optimizes Email Engagement
FBL will give you the idea of what your recipients dislike, what can be considered as spam, and isolate your target market. Acquiring all of this information can give you the ability to adjust your content, frequency, and develop an effective lead targeting strategy which will improve your open and click through rates.
Improves Sender Reputation
Maintaining a clean email list, ensuring to engage only with active recipients, and reducing spam complaints are compounding effects that develop an improved sender’s domain and IP reputation. Having this in your arsenal gives your email domain the boost to make sure that your emails land in the inbox rather than spam folders.
How to Set Up Feedback Loops for Your Email Campaigns
To start using Feedback Loops, follow these steps:
Identify Supported Mailbox Providers
Not all mailbox providers offer FBL services. Some major providers that do include:
- Yahoo
- Outlook (Microsoft)
- Comcast
- AOL
- Mail.ru
- Yandex
Gmail does not offer a traditional FBL but provides Postmaster Tools, which offer similar complaint insights.
Register for Feedback Loop Services
Each email provider has a different process for registering for FBLs. Typically, businesses must:
- Submit a request through the provider’s FBL registration page.
- Verify email ownership and agree to compliance terms.
- Configure FBL notifications to be sent to a designated email address.
Enhancing Your Email Deliverability With Warmy.io
Feedback loops are a critical component of email list hygiene and spam management, allowing businesses to maintain a clean and engaged email list. Including an FBL to your email marketing strategy is an essential step to improving your marketing initiatives and pursuing a more active lead generation capability. But having this alone would not be sufficient.
Integrating FBL with the email warmup capabilities of Warmy.io goes above the guarantee that your emails are delivered to your intended recipients. It makes sure that your email domains are reputable and trustworthy.
It supplies free email deliverability tests, with the capability to warm up your email domain and improve your sender reputation. You can also utilize our free SPF and DMARC Record Generators for a well-developed email authentication process.
Inbox or Email Placement Data
Before you employ that FBL, you need to guarantee where those emails are landing. Warmy’s inbox placement capabilities provide simple data of where email providers (Google, Yahoo, or Outlook) place your emails — inbox, spam, unreceived, or promotion.
Free Template Checker
Warmy’s free template check is the go-to of many email marketers. This gives them the proper evaluation of their email contents, determine if there are spammy terms that they used, and measure email performance before sending it to users.
Email Warmups
Before you know it, ISPs have already blacklisted your email domain. This can render your FBL irrelevant. And sometimes blacklisting occurs because you have a new or inactive email address which — for some ISP — makes your email account not trustworthy.
Warmy’s email warm-up process prevents your emails from being marked as spam by gradually increasing the sending volume. Warmy automates this process, making it easier to establish credibility with email service providers.
With our email warmups, you can send up to 5,000 emails per day avoiding any suspicion from ISPs, and slowly but smoothly build a solid reputation.
DNS Records Testing
One of the reasons why your emails are probably sent to spam is because of a misconfiguration in your Domain Name System. Feedback loops cannot determine this, but fortunately, Warmy can. You can subscribe to Warmy’s DNS records testing which can help you verify and automatically evaluate up to 100 DNS and ensure health mail server and setting.
24/7 Customer Support
We offer 24/7 Zoom calls, and chat support that will not only help you navigate through our system, but make sure that you achieve your long-term goals, and obtain reputable emails through our email deliverability.
Sign up for the 7-day free trial, or book a demo to avoid any negative feedback loops!
