E-Mail Marketing

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While most e-mail senders realize that spam complaints can impact their e-mail deliverability at the complainer's ISP, many senders do not realize that they can sign up to receive a copy of each spam complaint as it comes in. This is known as a "feedback loop," and many of the top ISPs now offer them -- AOL, Yahoo, MSN, Hotmail, Comcast, Excite, United Online, Road Runner, and USA.net. (Editor: You can find the specific URL by searching on the ISP's name with the phrase "feedback loop.")

The more spam complaints you get at a given ISP, the greater the likelihood that your e-mail will end up being sent to the junk folder instead of delivered to the inbox. In fact, if you get enough spam complaints, the ISP may even block your e-mail.

By monitoring your own spam complaints, you quite literally have your finger on the pulse of your e-mail's health at that ISP. When you are signed up for an ISP's feedback loop, you get a copy of every "this is spam" complaint that the ISP gets from their users about your e-mail. Many ISPs will remove the complainant's e-mail address first, so that you won't actually know who complained unless you are including a unique, user-specific token in each e-mail. Even without knowing who complained, though, having copies of these complaints is very useful, as it gives you a sense of how many complaints the ISPs are getting about your e-mail. Most ISPs have a complaint threshold above which they will start shunting your e-mail to the junk folder. For some of the top ISPs, all it takes is getting more than one complaint per thousand e-mails sent to their system for your e-mail to start heading towards junk land.

SuretyMail offers a unique Feedback Loop Reports service which takes all of the complaints you get from all of the ISPs and reduces them to a daily report which tells you how many complaints you received for the day at each ISP; the number of complaints broken down by subject; the number of complaints per "From" address; the number of complaints per sending IP address; the unique ID of each e-mail which generated a complaint; and, where possible, the e-mail addresses of those who complained. They'll even get you signed up for all of the feedback loops, if you like.

Regardless of whether you do it yourself, or outsource it, you should definitely be signed up for and monitoring your e-mail's feedback loops. The health of your e-mail deliverability depends on it.

Anne P. Mitchell is the CEO of the Institute for Social Internet Public Policy (ISIPP), a leading provider of e-mail deliverability assistance and e-mail accreditation through their SuretyMail service. Anne regularly writes about e-mail deliverability at ISIPP's Email Deliverability Blog.