The importance of a feedback loop

At email blaster HQ, we often get asked, why should I be using a service provider to send my email marketing instead of just doing it myself? The answer ties in neatly with the topic of this week’s post. A service provider such as ourselves will have a network and monitoring system built around achieving great delivery. They will be equipped to deal with any potential delivery issues before they become an issue.  A feedback loop is a vital part of this network and offers us and you an early warning system of any issues that many arise – before they start to affect your sales.

What exactly is a feedback loop?

A feedback loop – or FBL as you may hear it referred to, is a monitoring system. Major email service providers will communicate with the sending server about the quality of email traffic that they are receiving.

This means that they will let us know via an automated reporting system if any of their users are clicking the ‘spam’ button.  It gives us vital information on who is marking your mail as junk if your campaign has hit any spam traps.

Do all email service providers operate a feedback loop?

Nowadays, all of the major service providers operate a feedback loop, these include:

• AOL
• Microsoft
• Hotmail
• Yahoo
• Gmail

There are also a large number of third party FBL’s who supply data on behalf of smaller email service providers.

This means that this vital reporting tool is available for pretty much every email that you send through our servers.

Why is it important to know this information?

The great thing about email marketing is the vast array of analytics tools available. With it we can really drill down into the detail about how your recipients are reacting to what you are sending them.  This offers two main benefits, both of which will have a direct impact over the amount of products and services that you sell, based on your email marketing:

1. If your recipients are marking your send as spam there is a reason. This can means that perhaps your email subject head line and your body text are not being perceived as relevant to the recipient.  Your message may not strike home as quickly as it could – and the recipient is reacting negatively to your send.  By knowing this information – you can make the required changes to what you are sending. You can do this until your message is fine tuned enough to make a real positive hit with your recipients.  – And this means you are more likely to sell more!

2. If the FBL is reporting that your campaign is being received negatively or you have hit some spam traps. This affects the delivery rates of all of your future sends.  Negative feedback reports will cause the sending servers reputation to decline.  A bad server reputation means lower delivery for all future campaigns.  By receiving this information via an FBL we are able to advise you if any action needs to be taken. This may be with what you are sending – or to who you are sending.  This means that we can spot any issues early and work with you. This helps the email service provider with ensuring that the sending server’s reputation stays nice and high. A good sending server, means great delivery. Great delivery means more people are seeing your message……all of this equates to more sales for you.

Summary

A Feedback Loop is one of the many tools that we have at our disposal to help ensure that your email marketing delivers the right results for you every time you send.

In this series, we’ll take a look over the coming weeks at other methods and tools that we have at our disposal, all of these we deploy to help your sales message get through.

email blaster is free to try, why not open an account today and see how working with someone such as ourselves can really have a massive affect on the success of your marketing.