WP’s and O2’s FBL by EmailLabs – what is an email marketing Feedback loop and what does it mean for a sender?

Engaging email communication is an absolute must have for good deliverability. Recipients who are not interested in our messages should be able to unsubscribe quickly. Otherwise, they are likely to mark the email as spam. Such an event is returned by mail providers as the FBL status (feedback loop). EmailLabs supports this status based on data provided by Yahoo, Hotmail or AOL; recently we introduced support for the Feedback loop statuses also from the biggest Polish operator, WP. FBL from WP also includes spam markings from O2 mailboxes.

What is an email feedback loop?

A Feedback loop is a function that allows to inform senders of emails about complaints of users, who marked received messages as spam. Thanks to that we can verify if subscribers are interested in our communication, whether we send too many mailings in a given time or our emails are still providing any value to them.

How does an email Feedback loop work?

If users do not want to receive any more email from us, they click the “report as spam” button available in their mail. This results in our IP address being marked by a given provider, and after exceeding a certain number of the feedback loops, it lowers our reputation as an email sender, making further mailings go to the SPAM tab. At the same time, messages may be limited by the ISP (Internet service provider) and arrive with a long delay. In a nutshell: our deliverability drops dramatically. This concerns not only global providers but also local ones, such as WP and O2 in Poland.

Tools such as EmailLabs provide information about the status of the Feedback loops. If we use the Feedback loop function, we will receive full information about users who reported our mailing as spam, which will allow us to quickly identify and remove them from the mailing database. However, we should always strive to make our email communication engaging, interesting and tailored to the needs of different segments of subscribers, so that there are as few spam red flags as possible.

We often notice an increase in the number of the feedback loop statuses when sending messages to recipients from contacts databases that haven’t been used for a long time, or were collected a few years back – in those cases it is worth executing such campaigns from a separate infrastructure (different IP) which is not used for sending system, transactional or triggered messages from automation systems.

What are the benefits of an email marketing Feedback loop?

The main purpose of the Feedback loop function is the ability to unsubscribe the unhappy subscribers from our mailing base and is often used by those who do not see the list-unsubscribe option. A Feedback loop can act as a test for negative engagement with our audience. If users don’t want to receive messages from us, finding our communication uninteresting or annoying, they will most likely mark those emails as SPAM as a result. So it’s worth checking the email Feedback loop level after executing different types of mailings (newsletters, personalized messages, mailings with terms of use) to assess the subscribers’ mood. If we send out newsletters every other day and the number of FBLs is growing, it’s worth considering segmenting the database, adjusting it more to the recipients’ expectations or reducing the frequency of our email campaigns.

In case of security problems, the Feedback loop function also allows us to check all complaints related to our domain. It should be noted that if the security of our IP address has been compromised, we may, for example, receive complaints about messages that we never sent. EmailLabs allows you to purchase your own IP address from the PRO package so that senders can take care of its reputation and not share it with “neighbours” that are using the same infrastructure.

Email marketing Feedback loop requirements

Although the requirements vary from ISP to ISP, we can highlight a few basic rules that must be in place in order to use the FBL feature.

• You must be the owner of the IP/domain or have administrative rights in order to register
• The domain must have a functional postmaster@ or abuse @ email address
• The rDNS of the IP being entered must match the domain used
• A good reputation is an additional requirement

Email marketing Feedback loop by EmailLabs

EmailLabs provides support for the largest global and Polish email services: Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL and WP and O2. The Feedback loop statuses are shown separately, and mailings to these addresses are not repeated in subsequent campaigns: emails with the FBL mark go to an internal EmailLabs blacklist with the reason for the spam complaint. This allows senders to take care of their mailing reputation and flag negative recipient engagement in real time, so they can optimize their email strategies and execute subsequent mailings.

If you would like to learn more about FBL, please contact our specialists who will be happy to provide any information about this feature and the implementation itself.