Once you have created a Feedback Loop, you will be sent a copy of each complaint generated when an email recipient reports your email as spam.

Monitoring FBLs benefits both email senders and ESPs – they help manage mailing lists as well as providing early warnings of network security issues (such as bot infestations, compromised web forms, and other such sources of spam and abuse).

What is a Feedback Loop?

Some ESPs offer a feedback loop service for senders. When a subscriber reports email as spam (either through an interface option or sending the email to the ESP Postmaster), the ESP forwards that email back to the sender. Generally, ESPs expect that these transactions are processed as unsubscribe requests and that the sender (you) researches the nature of the request to reduce the incidence of complaints.

Feedback Loops are extremely valuable to help you get your messages delivered to the inbox. High recipient complaint rate is the top reason why email is blocked or filtered at many ESPs.  By allowing senders access to this complaint data, ESPs are demonstrating their commitment to making email work better for everyone.  And, by suppressing complainers from future email sends, you as the sender are respecting recipients’ wishes and also making email marketing work better for everyone

For more information on how to set-up Feedback Loops for all ISP’s that currently provide the service take a look at this guide put together by ReturnPath - http://www.returnpath.net/resources/archives/Return%20Path%20Feedback%20Loop%20Set%20Up%20Instructions.pdf

Download a PDF version of the checklist so you have it handy, or if you’d like to pass it on to whoever is responsible for setting up your email content.

1. Have all Content Validation tests have been passed?

When on the email template’s page, switch to the Validate tab and view the Content Validation panel. This checks for easily overlooked issues such as broken links and missing images.

2. Has ‘SpamAssassin’ panel flagged any potential spam issues?

When on the email template’s page, switch to the Validate tab and view the SpamAssassin panel. This checks for issues that might trigger your email to be marked as spam, preventing it from landing in your user’s inbox.

3. Are all links going to correct destinations?

Send yourself test emails and check all the links are going to their correct destinations, including view online and social share tags if you’ve used them. If you do find you’ve sent a campaign with the wrong links, fear not, you can change where the links direct to using the Live Links Editor in the campaign’s report.

4. Do all images have alt tags?

Alt tags are displayed when images are blocked, so are a good way to get a message across to the many users whose images are blocked by default. If you are not au fait with HTML you can use the online editor: right click the image and select Image Properties, and edit the Alternative Text form field.

5. Have you included [UNSUBSCRIPTION_CONTENT] tag, and is it clear in the content?

You should always include a clear unsubscription link in your content – it is a legal requirement when sending marketing emails in the EU and US.

6. Have you previewed any personalised content, is your user data ready to be merged in?

If you’ve used any merge fields for personalisation preview how the content will look for different users. Also double check all the users you are sending to have the required user data fields to be merged in.

7. Does the email display correctly in different email clients?

Email clients are notorious for rendering HTML email in different ways, affecting the layout and visual aesthetic of your email. The Inbox Inspector (found on the Testing tab of your email template page) allows you to quickly preview the email in many popular email clients. If the Inbox Inspector highlights issues you can’t resolve try running the HTML through a validator such as http://validator.w3.org/.

8. Have you included a text-only version?

Sending a text-only version of your HTML emails makes the content available to text-only email clients, including some mobile devices, and makes spam filters much less likely to mark your email as spam. Make sure you proof read the text-only version before sending.

9. Have all ‘Sender Verification’ tests have been passed?

Sender Verification is important in getting your email to land in the users inbox. On the ‘Send’ tab of your email template’s page you’ll find a ‘Sender Verification’ section – make sure all four items have a green tick before them. If any are highlighted in orange or red report these to your email solution’s support desk before sending.

10. Have all your recipients opted-in to receiving email (if sending B2C email)?

Failing to do so will have a massively detrimental effect on your sender reputation; worse still, as this is a legal requirement in the EU you could land yourself in some rather hot (and expensive) water!

It is important to note that ISPs aren’t looking solely at standard engagement metrics like opens, clicks, Spam complaints and unsubscribes. They are now looking at more passive indicators of engagement based on how users interact with a message on the whole. Take Hotmail for example. According to Return Path founder and president George Bilbrey, Microsoft has stated that it would be looking at numerous metrics, including:

• Messages read, then deleted
• Messages deleted without being read
• Messages replied to
• Frequency of receiving and reading a message from a source

Yahoo! Mail product Manager Carol Catajan has also confirmed that Yahoo! is tracking how many emails are being read, opened and clicked on with the data collected then being used to fine-tune it’s reputation system. In other words, if most of a sender’s emails aren’t being opened or clicked, their sender reputation will be adversely affected.

Similarly, Google is embracing engagement metrics with Gmail’s new “Priority Inbox”. This new feature flags email that it feels its users will want to see. It makes this determination based on the level of engagement it has seen from the user with certain types of emails. They look at the mail you have read and the mail you have replied to and elevate those messages in priority. When you log in to your Priority Inbox for the first time, you get a pop-up showing how a sampling of your messages has been prioritised and then are giving the opportunity to change the prioritisation.

Hotmail and Gmail also respond to prolonged inactivity by turning a user’s account off after 270 consecutive days without a login. Hotmail will give users an extra 90 days to reactivate the account, but after that, the account is deleted to make the storage space available to active users. Yahoo! is even more severe, closing accounts after only 160 days of inactivity – although this doesn’t apply to paid Yahoo! Mail Plus accounts.

With the lack of any activity (i.e. engagement) negatively affecting sender reputation, marketers need to make sure their programs are focused on increasing engagement, and that means leveraging customer data to better understand what interests them. Of course, this is in everyone’s best interest. These changes mean that companies can no longer afford to simply send the same email to every customer in hopes that a small percentage will open and respond. Instead, marketers need to ensure that they are gathering the data they need to maximize campaign performance and engagement – before it becomes the only metric that matters to the ISPs.

Useful links

Yahoo! Inbox Placement
Hotmail Engagement Metrics
Google Priority Inbox

Even in the scenarios where your email requirements are over and above what your current providers solution can deliver, you’re not happy with the service or support you are being given or you’re looking to make use of newer and more innovative features that will help to increase user engagement you may still be concerned about delivery issues, sender reputation, productivity loss, integration and the task of learning how to use a new solution.

It’s unlikely that a decision to switch to neteffekt will be taken lightly but here are five considerations that should help make the decision an easier one for you.

1. Transtioning
Our solutions can be up and running within 48 hours. Following this there are considerations to be made and discussions that will need to take place in order for us to understand your current projects and how they can be managed into a structured approach to delivery ramp-up.

Every business is different which we always take that into account and in our experience there’s no reason why new neteffekt solutions can’t be operating in a live environment in a matter of days.

2. Content & Data
We’re experienced in taking data and content from other solutions such as dotMailer, Cheetahmail and Silverop as well as other large ESPs. We work to ensure that the process of supporting your existing clients and projects is unaffected as you move them across to using the neteffekt solution. Whether you provide a managed service to you clients, they work as self-service or anything in between clients will assume access to their data and content will be available and we can assist to make that process as simple as is possible.

3. Integration
As a technology business integration is our comfort zone. Understanding and assisting with integration requirements and existing re-integration considerations is an area where we’re able to get involved and either work with your technical team or provide integration as a service.

There are many clients of neteffekt that have benefited from what we can do in terms of integration and when Premier Inn found that their previous ESP was unable to give them what they needed neteffekt were able to deliver – Read more…

4. Deliverability
Once we understand more about your emailing requirements and the service you provide to your clients we’re then able to advise on the best way to approach delivery from our solution. Existing domain names used in from email addresses can be transferred from your existing solution, there’s shared and dedicated IP address options that can be managed across your clients from within the solution and there’s a built-in reputation monitor to health check everything delivery related and can reporting on Return Path SenderScore.

We’re able to configure our mail servers inline with your delivery ramp-up plan and the level of detail in campaign reports provide real-time analysis and insight into delivery that can be used to tailor the solution in order to produce optimum delivery rates.

5. Usability, Training & Support
We consider the user interface of our solution to be the best around and we invite you to come and take a look. Usability is of great importance, not only to us but to our clients, as we want to deliver innovative and powerful features in a way that they’re easy to understand and to make use of.

We provide training to all new clients and we’re always available to provide further training in the event of staff changes within the businesses of our clients. The feedback we get from our clients is that the solution is very simple to use and is backed-up by a very responsive and knowledgable support team.

Taking the above into account and added to that the flexibility of neteffekt in being able to help the process of switching ESPs, not only in terms of support but also commercially, it should help you feel more comfortable about making the decision to change so you can start to see the benefits of using the neteffekt email marketing solution.

We have hundreds of clients worldwide of all different types ranging from design agencies, marketing agencies, list brokers, digital publishers, multi-brand and multi-departmental businesses, corporate companies and many more. Across the different types of businesses there’s a wide range reasons why they are attracted to and stick with neteffekt but one common factor is the white label aspect.

White label, sometimes called ‘private label’, means in summary that we provide hosted software as a service (SaaS) email marketing solutions that feature a way of hiding the fact the software is developed by neteffekt.

As an example, for a business that provides email marketing as a service to clients then it’s of great benefit to be able to manage them all within one solution, not only from a productivity point of view but also on the commercial side when taking into account aggregation and economies of scale.

The branding element of white label solutions gives the outward impression that it’s owned, developed  and supported by the business and gives clients that use it great confidence in the service. When re-inforced with solution and client level branding of email domain names, click domain names, logos, css and other styling and personalisation features a white-label email marketing solution starts to make complete sense.

neteffekt’s multi-client white label solution enables you to maximise revenue generated through email marketing and to increase your profit margin. Firstly, through a simple monthly service fee that covers the entire solution and that avoids less cost effective individual clients contracts and saves you money. Added to increased revenue generation is better economies of scale because of the way in which we view all the clients set-up within the solution as just one service and therefore one invoice. There’s also the ability to control the features available to clients which is supported by detailed reporting on usage activity meaning the potential is there to significantly improve email marketing service profit margins and ensure that everything used by clients is billed for.

Managing multiple clients within one solution presents different challenges for things like managing IP addresses, integration, reporting amongst other things and none of which are a problem  as the neteffekt solution handles them elegantly and with ease.

What does it mean to use dedicated IPs?

For example, if you are an email marketing vendor sending mail for multiple clients, the best situation would be that each client delivers their marketing emails from separate and dedicated IP addresses. If you are a company sending marketing or transactional emails out of your own systems, best to segment these IPs away from your corporate email systems.

The world is running out

Sounds simple, but there is a catch, the world is running out of IP addresses. An IP address is a four byte addressing system (sometimes called 32 bit) that is meant to identify a unique location (computer say) on the Internet. It must be unique; no IP address can be assigned more than once. But the IP addressing scheme was created almost 40 years ago now and it was never really anticipated what it might grow into by 2010 . The upshot of that is, with only 4 bytes you can only have 4,294,967,296 unique IP addresses (2 to the power of 32) in the entire world; a big number, but smaller than the 6 Billion or so people that inhabit the earth.

This has created a little bit of a dilemma; it is believed and is very likely that the world will run out of IP addresses in the next 2 to 3 years. IP addresses have therefore become a bit of a precious resource. Most email marketing companies probably would give all their clients dedicated IPs, if they weren’t so hard to come by.

Help is on the way for this. There is a new IP addressing scheme that has been in the works for quite a few years called “IP Version 6″ which has a 16 byte (128 bit) addressing scheme. That is 2 to the power of 128, a crazy big number, so big it probably doesn’t even have a name. Enough to give every computer, phone, TV, toaster it’s own dedicated IP address. But it would take a crazy big global effort to switch every computer system over to using this new addressing scheme. An effort that at some point (likely soon) we will have no choice but to make.

ISPs like them

Regardless of the fact that the world is running out, ISPs really like dedicated IPs. And they should, if you can confirm with them that X IP will only be sending X mail (and you are keeping an eye on it), that is one less IP they need to be concerned about as a source of SPAM. Also, if you set up your dedicated IPs in a certain way, you will be sending mail in a manner that would be very difficult (and time consuming) for a spammer to replicate.

Domain names and IP addresses

For an ISP to really like a dedicated IP there are some very specific things that need to be associated with it in relation to domain names (DNS). When you send an email there is a “From” address indicating the sender; and in this address there is a user part and a domain part (for example “user@domain.com” has the domain “domain.com”). A DNS server is a system that translates domains into IP addresses. Your computer can’t connect to your favorite website via the domain name, it needs to know the IP address. The DNS service is what allows for domain names to be translated into the numeric IP address.

Now back to our “user@domain.com” which we will say is the return address on our marketing campaign. Some machine somewhere is sending these emails and that machine has an IP address. If the IP address of that machine is the same IP that “domain.com” resolves to via DNS, then that is a major brownie point at pretty much any ISP. And by “dedicated” meaning only emails that end with “@domain.com” are ever sent from that IP.

Provides a level of authentication

The reason that ISPs like the fact that the DNS record for the sending domain matches the IP of the sending machine is because it shows that you have control over a public DNS server. That is you can presumably control what IP the domain “domain.com” points to. A spammer could do that too, but if they wanted to use their own domains to do it, they would have to pay for and register those domains. They aren’t really into that. They can steal your domain name and send their spam as “@domain.com,” and deliver it that way from a wide variety of IP addresses very easily; but it would be very difficult for them to send those emails with that domain and from your IP address (provided your network security is working fine).

Reverse DNS

An extra level of authentication is provided by what is called a reverse DNS. This is essentially the same thing as a “forward” DNS, but instead the IP address is translated into the domain name. This is a DNS service as well, but usually it isn’t owned by you. Usually this service is owned by your ISP or Data Center provider. They typically are who have the “delegation” of the IP address you are using (even though it is completely dedicated to you). So they more or less have to “vouch” for you by setting up this reverse DNS record for your domain. This is yet another level of authentication. If you actually do own the full rights to your IP addresses, then you can set up your reverse DNS on your own. Not many spammers can do that.

Saying HELO

When a mail server connects to a remote server to deliver mail, it starts the transaction by saying HELO (it is just 1 “L”). Along with this greeting is included the domain name of the machine that the mail server is running on. Again, this is another location where the domain should be our “domain.com” domain.

Now we have a 3 way match between the domain of the From email address, the reverse DNS mapping back to that domain, and the mail server reporting it is running on a machine named “domain.com”.

Most certification requires them

Many Email Certification programs, such as ReturnPath’s “Sender Certified” program require that you are sending your mail from dedicated IP addresses. The “Sender Certified” program in particular is the only Whitelist that Microsoft accepts, meaning in order to get Whitelisted by Hotmail and MSN, you must be sending your marketing email via dedicated IP addresses.

Feedback loops

When an email recipients click “This Is Spam” for a piece of email sent from one of your IPs, this is considered a “complaint”. If you are having difficulty delivering email to ESPs (such as Yahoo!, Microsoft, AOL) a Feedback Loop (FBL) would benefit you.

Take a look at our guide on how to get onto Feedback Loops provided by ESPs

ISP relations

Having dedicated IPs setup in the manner mentioned above goes a long way in getting your deliverability matters resolved more quickly with an ISP. The configuration is very clean, there is one domain and one IP address. Anything that deviates from that can be considered SPAM.

It would be best if all email communications were setup this way, but until we get it together and adopt a more robust addressing scheme, at least make sure your bulk marketing emails are using dedicated IPs.

It’s not difficult to do things the correct way and build sender reputation, ISPs want to deliver your emails if your campaigns are exactly what you say they are – so make it easy for them to identify you and if they give you feedback, listen!

Every business that sends email needs to overcome different challenges but this handy guide should get you going in the right direction…

Use dedicated IPs

Always an important factor, dedicated IPs are still the best guarantee of good deliverability and good Email Sever Provider (ESP) relations. More and more ESPs are requiring dedicated IPs in order to join a feedback program, get whitelisted or resolve a deliverability problem. When you contact an ESP to resolve that block they just put on your domain, ticking that “dedicated IP” check box goes a long way in getting this matter resolved.

Find out more about the importance of dedicated IPs.

Use feedback loops

Feedback Loops are a mechanism whereby an ISP can send information to a marketer regarding who is clicking the “This is SPAM” button on their emails. It is typically a subscription service that any marketer can subscribe to, and works by forwarding a copy of the email sent to an email address specified by the marketer every time someone clicks the button. The marketer is then supposed to unsubscribe anyone who did click on the SPAM button, and compliance with that goes a long way in improving relations with ISPs.

Yahoo! just started offering a feedback loop in 2009, and many others have also come on board recently. We are all waiting to know when we will be seeing that Gmail FBL.

Find out more about to enroll on Feedback Loops.

Ensure compliance with international laws

More and more companies that do business online are finding that online commerce doesn’t always end at the border. Beyond the US CAN-SPAM act, are you doing everything you should be doing to ensure your emails are compliant with all International laws? Read this overview to find out what you can do to ensure that you are.

Don’t forget about open rates

It has never really been the case that open rates gave an actual count of the total number of people that opened an email campaign, it always under reported it. For starters it only works with HTML email and now many html mail clients block images by default (most open rate tracking systems work via image download).

But don’t throw away those open stats so quick. While for sure, they don’t give an accurate count of the total number of opens, they are still very useful for comparative analysis. For example, if you break out your open rates on a particular mailing by ISP say, you can get a good indication of whether or not any particular ISP is blocking you or not.

The same is true for A/B subject line testing. The difference in open rates between subject A and B is really the best indicator of which subject line performed better; a better indicator than overall response rates.

Know your Spam score

Most anti-spam software works by assigning a particular score to everything that is spammy within an email message. For example, if the email contains the word “Viagra” it will get a score of 1.0, if the subject is ALL CAPS, it will get a score of 2.0. Each of these spam points are then summed together to produce an overall spam score for the message. A very popular and open source anti-spam system called SpamAssassin considers any piece of email with a score above 5.0 to be SPAM.

It is good to know your Spam score, since if a program like SpamAssassin were to assign a score of say 7.0 or above, you could probably expect to see some major deliverability problems. Our email solution runs your content through SpamAssassin and checks whether your email will pass popular spam filters, including Outlook and Google’s Postini.

Use inbox detection software

Another very interesting tool provided by Return Path is inbox placement. How this software works is a special seed list is included with your batch mailout. This seed list includes email addresses for a wide number of ISPs, typical all over the world. After you send out your batch email, the vendor’s software then logs into those ISPs to figure out if their seed emails went into the spam folder or the inbox. This is a very effective way of knowing whether or not your mail is being seen or going JUNK.

Monitor blacklists

There are several websites that allow you to freely monitor whether or not your email is on any public blacklists or not (for example: http://www.mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx). It is a good idea to check your IPs now and again at these sites to ensure you are not listed on any. Being listed on some of these blacklists can have some serious effects on your deliverability; but most have a straightforward process for requesting removal.

It is also good to check the IPs of any third party vendor prior to sending any emails with them. A good check to make sure they are doing all they can with the reputation of their IPs.

Find out more about how you can monitor blacklists using neteffekt

Don’t hide that unsubscribe link

Nobody wants anyone to unsubscribe from their marketing program, so people sometimes have the tendency to try to hide their unsubscribe link in fine print at the bottom of the email. Further, once clicked on, the process for how to actually unsubscribe can sometimes be confusing at best.

The tendency to want to try to hide the unsubscribe link should be avoided. No matter what, if you are doing Email Marketing on a regular basis, someone will eventually think it is spam and want to unsubscribe. And if they do want to, best that they click your link than click their email provider’s “This is SPAM” button. Spam complaints (people clicking the SPAM button) are the number 1 reason that an ISP will block you. So don’t hide that link thinking it will keep your list healthy, it won’t.

Authentication

There are two major email authentication schemes that have gained a fair amount of critical mass over the last few years called SPF and DomainKeys/DKIM. These systems are designed to improve the identity of the sender of an email in the hopes of reducing the possibility of phishing.

Authentication schemes are something that need to be implemented at the email infrastructure and DNS level. They are a good thing to do though, for example Yahoo! won’t allow you to subscribe to their Feedback Loop unless you are using a DomainKey or DKIM. They also likely would not be quite as helpful in resolving any deliverability issues if you don’t have one. And Microsoft (Hotmail/MSN) will always recommend that you set up an SPF record (they call it SecureID) before resolving any block.

Our solution enables you to not only use your own sending domains but also configure and monitor DKIM & SPF records.

Get to know your ISPs

ISPs and anti-spam vendors are constantly tweaking and modifying their systems to ever combat the plague of spam. As a marketer, the results of this is that one day you might get blocked, say by Microsoft. For whatever reason, your mailing habits and their software hit a confluence that resulted in Microsoft thinking you are a spammer. How do you get out of this? The only way to really get it resolved is to contact the ISP. Usually this involves submitting a ticket to their anti-spam department via an online form, then negotiating (pleading) with them to resolve the issue via email.

However, the most important thing in resolving these types of matters is to make sure to keep an open dialog with the ISP. They will always provide recommendations (many of which are already listed here) and it is important to show that you are taking those recommendations seriously. Spammers are masters of deception, so any sign of that will get you into hot water quick with an ISP. By keeping the dialog open with the ISP relations improve over time and resolution times tend to drop.

Seems sensible, but the litany of example after example of companies putting their brands at risk and downgrading their brand’s impact continues to this day. It has been – and continues to be – too easy for legacy email systems to enable cavalier attitudes towards the email space.

Email is now an embedded communication channel millions of people prefer and as a result, consumers more than ever expect companies to behave responsibly – and expect those brands they have invited into their lives over time to transfer that aura of respect, trust and dependability to email communications.

Email has been viewed as the “cheap” channel – so shooting poor data through the network has not been taken seriously due to the relatively low cost of sending campaigns out the door. As email has evolved over several years, and as ISPs more actively manage traffic across their server networks, the idea of “throwing spaghetti against the wall” is no longer responsible or acceptable.

Compromising the reputation of your IP addresses compromises your brand. It is time consuming, costly and unintelligent – particularly in light of the fact the latest advances in email software enable the user to actively manage all aspects of the email channel and see precisely how their brands are being represented to ISPs and markets at large.

Data integrity is equal to Brand integrity. This is not a new concept. Smart, successful direct mailers using the postal channel have embraced this tenant for years – and prospered from it. Brand “strength” and “reach” were achieved in many cases through maintaining a keen eye on driving efficiency across all direct marketing channels.

Transfer of those historical tried and true direct marketing drivers into an easy to use, easy to manage and easy to test solution suite now allow smart email marketers to realise efficiencies in the channel that were just not possible or too costly to actualise in years past.

Advanced, transparent reputation monitors ensure your control of how your brand is being received. A/B Testing that requires no/low support ensures you take control of how your brand grows. Fail-safe routines allow you to take control of your brand’s perception in the marketplace by eliminating broken links, ensuring opt-in/opt-out compliance and catching oversights such as “no subject” and image rendering failures – before your campaign is sent.

Take control of your brand – just like you used to. Protect it. Enhance it. Extend it.