Deliverability vs. Inbox Placement
Posted: Sun Feb 02, 2025 5:44 am
Those who are not familiar with email marketing terms may confuse deliverability with inbox placement.
Inbox Placement can be translated as 'assignment in the email inbox'. That is, after delivery, it is the place where the ESP ( Email Service Provider ) places the message - either in the main inbox, in the offers tab or in the spam tab.
Messages that are directed to the primary inbox gain more attention from readers and often generate a notification on mobile devices, which helps increase engagement rates (opens and clicks).
Although very important, inbox placement is a little more complicated to measure because it takes into account two factors:
Your reputation with that specific subscriber — that is, whether tunisia phone data that person opens, clicks on, and moves your emails between different folders;
Your reputation with the email provider as a whole — that is, whether the majority of your Gmail (or Hotmail, or any other ESP) subscribers are opening, clicking, and moving your emails.
With that out of the way, the lesson is: first you take care of deliverability (whether or not the emails reach the readers' inboxes) and only then you worry about inbox placement .
How to track your deliverability
Now that you understand the conceptual part, let's see how all this works in practice!
The best way to check your deliverability is by evaluating these 3 points:
1. Gather historical data on your deliverability
In February 2017, when I joined the Rock team , I was very excited to get to work and carry out our email marketing strategy.
The first 3 months were all about learning and memorizing processes: how to create good copy, technical details of scheduling campaign dates, and so on.
Just when I thought I had a good handle on these issues and was ready for the next steps, I got scared. As I closed out May, I noticed that our deliverability was at 95% — a figure so low that we had only reached it for 3 months in 2016, when we were blacklisted.
From that moment on, I informed my supervisor Clara Borges, professor of the Email Marketing course at Rock Content University , and we set off for action.
A 95.4% delivery rate is still acceptable, but given our track record of deliverability, this value was clearly a red flag.
Eventually we discovered that the problem was with the reputation of our shared IPs and ended up switching to a dedicated IP.
Despite this, we learned to follow this data in a more analytical and strategic way — and I suggest you do the same!
At the end of each month, export the data from all the shots you've fired and calculate the median deliverability rate (as well as the opening, click, unsubscribe, and spam flags). This is the information that will help you pinpoint problems more accurately and perhaps even remedy them.
Inbox Placement can be translated as 'assignment in the email inbox'. That is, after delivery, it is the place where the ESP ( Email Service Provider ) places the message - either in the main inbox, in the offers tab or in the spam tab.
Messages that are directed to the primary inbox gain more attention from readers and often generate a notification on mobile devices, which helps increase engagement rates (opens and clicks).
Although very important, inbox placement is a little more complicated to measure because it takes into account two factors:
Your reputation with that specific subscriber — that is, whether tunisia phone data that person opens, clicks on, and moves your emails between different folders;
Your reputation with the email provider as a whole — that is, whether the majority of your Gmail (or Hotmail, or any other ESP) subscribers are opening, clicking, and moving your emails.
With that out of the way, the lesson is: first you take care of deliverability (whether or not the emails reach the readers' inboxes) and only then you worry about inbox placement .
How to track your deliverability
Now that you understand the conceptual part, let's see how all this works in practice!
The best way to check your deliverability is by evaluating these 3 points:
1. Gather historical data on your deliverability
In February 2017, when I joined the Rock team , I was very excited to get to work and carry out our email marketing strategy.
The first 3 months were all about learning and memorizing processes: how to create good copy, technical details of scheduling campaign dates, and so on.
Just when I thought I had a good handle on these issues and was ready for the next steps, I got scared. As I closed out May, I noticed that our deliverability was at 95% — a figure so low that we had only reached it for 3 months in 2016, when we were blacklisted.
From that moment on, I informed my supervisor Clara Borges, professor of the Email Marketing course at Rock Content University , and we set off for action.
A 95.4% delivery rate is still acceptable, but given our track record of deliverability, this value was clearly a red flag.
Eventually we discovered that the problem was with the reputation of our shared IPs and ended up switching to a dedicated IP.
Despite this, we learned to follow this data in a more analytical and strategic way — and I suggest you do the same!
At the end of each month, export the data from all the shots you've fired and calculate the median deliverability rate (as well as the opening, click, unsubscribe, and spam flags). This is the information that will help you pinpoint problems more accurately and perhaps even remedy them.