Deliverability is an essential metric most email marketers track to measure campaign success yet it’s only one part of a bigger whole. Your inbox placement rate, which can be managed through means such as a spam score test, takes deliverability to the next level by analyzing actual inbox activity.
Did your email reach the inbox of your recipient or did it go to the junk folder? Was it sent on time? Such details are vital for businesses, especially to those sending time-limited offers.
If email deliverability is measured by the activity in a mailing list, inbox placement rates are assessed based on the percentage of messages that reach their intended destinations.
Inbox placement rate is a more crucial metric to monitor since limited time emails would lose its effectiveness if it doesn’t reach inboxes during key selling points.
Why Is It Important to Optimize Your Pre and Post Send Inbox Placement?
Creating an email marketing campaign is no easy task. Marketers work hard to create the right design and message hoping that their target audience reads their messages.
Yet the hours spent producing the copy and fixing issues that come up will be all for naught if these emails end up in the spam folder. Messages that are labeled as spam will have a significantly lower open rate and would essentially fail to serve their purpose.
There are many factors that anti-spam measures and filters take into account when monitoring emails. Your messages can easily be categorized as spam without your knowledge.
Most of the time, businesses only start looking for these issues once they notice their email performance has started to drop. At this point, the damage to your email deliverability and everything else has already been done.
That is why many brands look towards tools that offer the ability to carry out a spam score test and monitor inbox placement rates. The MailMonitor spam score testing feature, for example, can help users track and resolve potential problems with deliverability before sending out emails.
What Can MailMonitor Do With Inbox Placement?
Most marketers believe that deliverability is a mystery and that it is impossible to obtain insights about it before clicking the send button. This is where MailMonitor comes in.
MailMonitor offers tools that allow marketers to monitor their pre-send and post-send inbox placement rates to ensure their emails have the highest probability of reaching their targets. One of the ways it can check for pre-send inbox placement is through spam score testing.
Inbox providers won’t share much of their secrets on how they flag spam-like messages and spam filters are constantly updating their algorithms to ensure their measures are fool-proof. However, there are a few ways that can damage email deliverability. These include:
- Your domain has been blocklisted which increases the likelihood of emails sent through it being marked by spam filters.
- Your emails lack proper authentication such as failing to use Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM).
- Your Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC) are configured incorrectly.
- Your message contains spam-like content and links that increase its likelihood of being sent to the spam folder.
The good news is that all of these mistakes can be checked beforehand so you can avoid them. When an issue is spotted, marketers can fix them easily before sending it, thus helping prevent deliverability problems.
Pre-send spam score test tools, like that offered by MailMonitor, provide marketing teams with more control on deliverability while allowing them to proactively tackle issues.
Concerning post-send inbox placement, MailMonitor can provide you with the crucial insight you need on how your emails performed after sending them out. We provide you with a worldwide inbox monitor that lets you leverage open tracking as well as deliverability insights on the leading inbox providers.
This should provide you with the data you need to know how well your messages performed once you click send.
Pre-Send Inbox Placement Features of MailMonitor
These are the pre-send inbox placement features you can expect from MailMonitor:
- Spam score: Spam filter scores, or simply called spam scores, are the scores that determine the number of emails that get flagged as spam compared to the number of messages that reached their target inboxes. A higher score means that a large number of your emails were labeled as spam. The MailMonitor spam score can let you check and see how your email will fare even before you send it. This takes away the guesswork and lets you get raw page data of what your message looks like in the eyes of the internet service providers (ISPs).
- ISP tracking: ISPs assess multiple factors regarding your email marketing activities and will provide you with a sender reputation score according to their findings. Keeping track of your reputation score is vital as an email sender as it lets you know your standing with ISPs. MailMonitor provides users with reputation tracking capability to see how their emails are affecting their delivery results.
- Seed tests: In seed testing, you can leverage a list of email addresses that you can send your message to so you can test and see how it goes before actually clicking the send button to your target audience. With this list, you can test across various device types, ISPs, and browsers to assess how your email appears before you send it to your contacts. Running seed tests with MailMonitor will let you know which ISPs are delivering your emails straight to the inbox, how fast your emails are being delivered, and how the quality of your list is affecting your email deliverability.
- Blocklist monitoring: MailMonitor utilizes email blacklist monitoring to check multiple times daily to verify if your IP addresses and domains have been listed on any block list. In case you are listed, the system will automatically notify you via email so you can try to resolve the problem and start the delisting process.
- Inbox anomaly detection: MailMonitor provides users with tools that can help them pinpoint problems with their email deliverability. The insights that their inbox anomaly detection feature provides can help marketers improve their email marketing campaigns and increase their probability of success.
- Email previews: Our email content preview feature lets you send a test to various email service providers. MailMonitor will then check the given email accounts automatically and obtain real screenshots of your email from well-known email service providers and browsers. This email preview capability can help email design teams troubleshoot email problems and improve workflows.
Post-Send Inbox Placement Features of MailMonitor
Here are the post-inbox placement features that you can leverage when you use MailMonitor:
- Gmail tab monitoring: By default, Google Mail now sends an email to one out of three tabs namely the Primary, Promotions, or Social tabs. As an email marketer, it’s understandable if you’re concerned about the specific Gmail tab your emails will be delivered to, which is what MailMonitor provides. You get to verify which of these tabs receive your emails so you can change your overall marketing strategy and land in the right Gmail tab each time.
- Open tracking: MailMonitor offers an open tracking tool that lets email marketers acquire useful information with regards to the performance and deliverability of their emails. This means that they will know if their recipients have seen their messages and if they’ve interacted with these emails when opening them. One of the main benefits of open tracking is that it lets you avoid countless rounds of follow-up emails and conversations so you can engage and convert leads in less time.
Improving Inbox Placement With Low Bounce Rates
The quality of email lists decays at a certain percentage each month. B2B lists have a higher decay rate compared to B2C lists because people at work change their emails more times than those using personal emails. Those who haven’t engaged with their mailing list for several months can expect to have a higher bounce rate when sending emails in bulk.
With a bounce rate higher than 10%, your account can get suspended by various email marketing platforms. It also harms your sender reputation and email deliverability.
Since inbox providers pay special attention to the bounce rate of senders, they may end up blocking emails from you if they find you are delivering to too many invalid email addresses.
That’s why it’s important to verify old and unengaged lists before importing them to an email marketing campaign. You should do this to all lists that you haven’t engaged within the last two months.
The verification process typically starts by uploading a CSV file. After the validation has been completed, you’ll be presented with statistics on the results as well as the option to download the verified list.
The four most common statuses used by verification systems are:
- Deliverable: These are the email addresses that are safe for you to send messages to.
- Undeliverable: These email addresses no longer exist and you should avoid sending to them.
- Risky: These email addresses have a high probability of resulting in a high bounce rate.
- Unknown: These are email addresses that couldn’t be verified by the service and could also result in a high bounce rate.
As much as possible, you should obtain the deliverable, risky, and unknown email addresses and add them to separate lists. You should then upload them to your chosen email marketing platform.
When beginning a new email marketing campaign with a new provider, you should only focus on those addresses that are labeled as deliverable. This helps ensure that your account has minimal bounce rates. This is also one of the most crucial best practices to follow since most providers will move you to a shared IP pool tier that will correlate to the campaigns that you send in the first few days.
You can expect an average of about 30% bounce rates for email lists that contain addresses considered as risky or unknown by an email verification system. These email addresses should be added slowly in bulk email marketing campaigns over time so you can verify them through sending emails.
To Wrap Things Up
Overall email deliverability and Sender Reputation are essential metrics to keep an eye on especially as an email marketer. However, another crucial stat to monitor is the inbox placement rate of your campaigns.
Inbox placement rate is the percentage of your messages that arrive at their designated inboxes. Your inbox placement rate is closely tied to your deliverability and should be tracked accordingly.
MailMonitor provides users with a suite of tools that not only allows them to improve their email deliverability but also their inbox placement rates. Features such as the MailMonitor spam score test, blocklist monitoring, email previews, and open tracking lets you identify and fix issues with your campaigns so you can improve your inbox placement rates.
The great thing about MailMonitor is that you get exactly what you sign up for with its annual plans. Besides affordable and flexible pricing, you also get access to dedicated deliverability experts who will assist you in enhancing your inbox placement.
By leveraging MailMonitor and its pre and post-send inbox placement and spam testing capabilities, you will experience better deliverability for your email marketing campaigns.
