What are the best ways to measure email deliverability and inbox placement rates?
Summary
What email marketers say13Marketer opinions
Email marketer from Neil Patel shares that warming up your IP address gradually by sending emails in increasing volumes helps establish a positive sender reputation with ISPs, improving deliverability for new IP addresses.
Email marketer from Stack Overflow explains that setting up feedback loops with major ISPs allows you to receive complaints from recipients, helping you identify and remove problematic subscribers from your list to improve deliverability.
Email marketer from EmailToolTester shares that A/B testing of different email elements, such as subject lines and content, can help improve engagement and, consequently, deliverability by optimizing what resonates best with your audience.
Email marketer from Reddit shares that regularly using list cleaning services helps remove invalid, inactive, or problematic email addresses from your list, improving deliverability and reducing bounce rates.
Email marketer from Mailchimp explains that using a double opt-in process ensures that subscribers genuinely want to receive your emails, reducing the chances of spam complaints and improving your sender reputation.
Email marketer from GlockApps shares that using a deliverability testing tool like GlockApps allows you to send test emails to various mailbox providers and receive detailed reports on inbox placement, spam folder placement, and authentication issues.
Marketer from Email Geeks recommends looking at Google Postmaster, Sender Score, and Microsoft SNDS, and focusing on the open/click/conversion data by email by mailbox provider.
Marketer from Email Geeks states that ReturnPath Certification provides inbox placement data for Hotmail and Yahoo.
Email marketer from Reddit explains that closely monitoring your bounce rate helps identify issues with your email list, such as invalid or inactive addresses, which can negatively impact your sender reputation and deliverability.
Email marketer from Mailjet shares that seed list testing involves sending emails to a list of seed addresses and monitoring inbox placement. This provides a direct view of where your emails land across different providers.
Marketer from Email Geeks shares that with their second-party data pool, they can determine if emails are landing in the inbox or spam folder. They admit there are limitations but can determine the inboxing location for a portion of the audience.
Email marketer from HubSpot shares that segmenting your email list allows you to send more targeted and relevant emails, which improves engagement and reduces the likelihood of recipients marking your emails as spam.
Email marketer from Litmus shares that tracking engagement metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates provides insights into how recipients are interacting with your emails, which can indicate deliverability issues if engagement is low.
What the experts say6Expert opinions
Expert from Email Geeks refers to a more detailed explanation about Gmail's individualistic filtering and the limitations and usefulness of seedlist testing, providing a link to further information.
Expert from Spam Resource explains that using providers such as 250ok (now Validity) or Return Path (now Validity) can show you what percentage of your mail is delivered to the inbox.
Expert from Spam Resource explains that you should be looking at how many messages were accepted, how many were deferred, and how many failed. You'll need to parse logs and look at deferrals and failures to get an idea of the type of deliverability problems you might have.
Expert from Email Geeks explains that seedlists provide measurable numbers, but their correlation with actual inbox placement at specific mailbox providers might not be clear and requires interpretation. He recommends to focus on changes in seedlist data to make informed decisions, while suggesting to also consider image loads, rejections and clicks.
Expert from Email Geeks shares that while seedlists are the best current method, metrics like opens/clicks (if too low) and bounces (if too high) can also indicate deliverability issues.
Expert from Word to the Wise shares that factors include authentication, list hygiene, content and spam traps. Authentication helps prove your identity, list hygiene ensures you're sending to engaged users, content avoids spam triggers, and avoiding spam traps prevents blacklisting.
What the documentation says4Technical articles
Documentation from RFC explains that implementing SPF, DKIM, and DMARC email authentication protocols helps verify that your emails are legitimate, improving your sender reputation and reducing the likelihood of being marked as spam.
Documentation from Microsoft explains that the Smart Network Data Services (SNDS) provides data about your IP address reputation and complaint rates from Hotmail users, which assists in identifying and resolving deliverability problems.
Documentation from Google explains that Postmaster Tools provides insights into your email reputation, spam rate, and other metrics, helping you diagnose and fix deliverability issues by monitoring sender reputation, spam complaints, and authentication.
Documentation from Amazon explains that Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) provides detailed deliverability metrics, including bounces, complaints, and delivery rates, helping you monitor and optimize your email sending practices.