We are constantly astonished by the number of email senders who are not taking advantage of one of the greatest free resources out there - feedback loops from the ISPs.

In fact, we require all of our email deliverability accreditation customers to sign up for all of the feedback loops out there, which include feedback loops from AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail, Comcast, and RoadRunner, just to name a few.

Feedback loops allow you to receive notice - usually in real time - any time one of the ISP's users hits "this is spam" on an email which originated from one of your IP addresses.

Now, let's face it, this isn't rocket science - the more spam complaints you get at a given ISP, the more likely it is that your email is going to end up in the junk folder at that ISP.  And if you don't address the situation,  you may even end up blocked there.  Staying on top of user complaints as they happen through feedback loops is the first step to heading these problems off at the pass.

Put another way, by monitoring your own spam complaints you quite literally have your finger on the pulse of your email's health at that ISP.  Through the ISP's feedback loop, you get a copy of every 'this is spam' complaint that the ISP gets from their users about your email.   Most ISPs sanitize their feedback loops by removing the email address of the user who complained before sending the complaint on to you, so unless you are including a unique, user-specific token in each email (always a good idea) you won't know who actually complained.  However, even without knowing who complained, having copies of those complaints is very useful.  For example, most ISPs have a complaint threshold above which they will start throwing your email into the junk folder instead of the inbox, so you want to keep your spam complaints well below that threshold.  

And beyond the email deliverability aspect, if a substantial number of users are complaining about your email, that means that your email probably isn't making the impact that you are hoping that it will!

Once you start receiving your feedback loops, you can garner all sorts of interesting - and useful - information from them by aggregating and analyzing them.  For example, the Feedback Loop Reports service that we offer tells our senders how many complaints they received for the day at each ISP;  the number of complaints per "From" address;  the number of complaints per sending IP address; and the unique ID of each email which generated a complaint.  All things you would expect.  But, it also tells our senders how many complaints they received for each subject line!  Imagine being able to fine tune the first thing that your users see - the subject line - based on real time feedback!  It's all there in the feedback loops - which are free for the asking - if you just look.

So, if you aren't already signed up for all the feedback loops you can eat, you are missing out on a valuable resource, containing vital information, for your own email deliverability.  And whether you choose to outsource it, or roll your own, you should definitely be analyzing the information available to you in those ISP feedback loops.   The health of your email deliverability depends on it.

I am so very pleased to have been invited to join Deliverability.com as an author, and I can't think of a more fitting way to ring in 2009 which is, I believe, the year of the Internet Business.

While the state of the economy the world over ranges from "in question" to downright concerning, and jobless rates are climbing, I remain convinced that in the online world, not only are things not as dire, but that Internet-based companies in general, and email-driven companies in particular, will not only not spiral downwards, but will thrive.

In fact, as I said in some recent press, what we're seeing is that the email industries are exploding with growth. We've said all along that the Internet industries would be the growth industries in the next economic cycle.  For those Internet companies that are lean and light on their feet, they will not only weather the storm, but they will grow during - perhaps even <i>because of</i> - this economic cycle.

We certainly are seeing this in our own business.  Our growth has not dropped - in fact it has increased, and business has never been better.  As more expensive ways of doing business are cut from the budget, more and more companies are going to be bringing their message, their marketing, and even their products to the Internet.  And they all need to send email, and they want that email to be delivered to the inbox.

This also means that email deliverability has never been more critical, both as legitimate businesses start to more closely scrutinize the return on their email marketing dollar, and as the flood of email from less savvy - or less savoury - businesses increases the swell, requiring legitimate email to ever more clearly distinguish itself in order to get delivered.

It's my privilege to assist businesses with these issues, and I look forward to contributing to that end on these pages.

Here's to your business success in 2009!

Anne

Anne P. Mitchell
SuretyMail.com