How Feedback Loops Analysis Enhance Deliverability in Email Marketing

Published in 15 de febrero de 2016

Have you ever heard of Feedback Loops? Do you know the meaning of the term and what it does? The appeal is directly linked to user complaints about your email marketing and can be valuable to describe the content you submit. This is the mission of our post today on the blog. Shall we go?

Understand how the Feedback Loop affects your email

The Feedback Loop is a resource created by Return Path, a company focused on 'email intelligence', and consists of an alerts system via email,  in order to know when a user marks a message as junk or spam. Spam complaints about your email marketing campaigns have a huge impact on your reputation as a sender, so would it be useful to know who is reporting your mail as spam?

The feature works as a tool to the servers to monitor abuse on their networks. They are also available for senders who would like to use the information to perform a cleaning on their lists of customers and gain insights into what may be negatively affecting their email marketing strategy.

Meet the email providers using the resource

The option to create feedback loops is widely disseminated by many email providers. The following is a list of some names that have the functionality:


Note that Gmail is not part of the list, but it has an automatic mechanism to register cancellation. That's because Google’s email provider offers the user the option to cancel the registration when a message is marked as spam, although it was previously added to the list of trusted senders. By confirming, Gmail itself send an email to the sender requesting user registration to be canceled. The process is similar to the Feedback Loop, but it only works if the sender is on the list of trusted addresses.

How complaints can help your email marketing

No one likes to receive negative criticism, not even to receive complaints. However, it’s not always a bad thing. Complaints can help your business to qualify your email marketing campaigns by identifying the actual conditions of contact lists, content, frequency and customer regularly.

  • List: may indicate problems if you have two separate lists receiving similar content as often.

  • Content: may indicate the same as the previous item, so it’s worth noting that relevance is even more essential in this case.

  • Frequency: may indicate expectations for those who receive the emails, so no more, no less, just send what was settled at the time of optin.

  • Time: may indicate old contacts and even inactive contacts on your list, and they are very likely to have been reported your email as spam.

How can you take advantage in your campaigns

The first step to enjoy the benefits of feedback loop begins with your registration. It’s important to take note that regardless of your provider, it's free. Listed above are the links with their respective providers, directing to the registration form. Each one will ask for different information, which may vary between domain, IP address to send the emails, your contact details and the email registered to receive return messages. Some may go further, requesting authentication of DKIM.

The return email is a copy of the message with the user's complaint, which can be used by the sender to collect any information from there. The most popular format for that is the Abuse Reporting Format or ARF. With the feedback loop, you can remove these users from your contact database, avoiding negative impact on deliverability rate of your email marketing campaigns and avoiding your reputation to be putted down due to the detour of these messages, if they continue to be sent, to the spam box. In addition, you can also identify network security problems. In a few words, if your IP, for some reason, is compromised, you will know and you will be able to take an action to reverse the situation. And to list another benefit of FBLs, you will be able to collect more detailed data from campaigns, perhaps even proven some ineffective actions, taking the chance to re-evaluate and to target them in a better way to improve your lists and to distribute your IPs to send.

Therefore, the feature can be an opportunity to enrich your email marketing campaigns. Through it, you can see how your customers really feel about the content they receive. And there is a chance for your company to understand this feeling and to convert them to generate greater engagement with your contact database.

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