Deliverability Guessing Game

Mar 20, 2025

AudiencePoint

Imagine there is a jar filled with 10 million colored marbles. You have been tasked with figuring out the distribution of each color, but the jar is opaque. There are three strategies you are able to follow to try and complete your task.

Seed Lists – You know which factory all the marbles came from, so you could get 150 marbles from that factory and guess the distribution in the jar based upon that sample.
Panel Data – You could get a list of the color of 50 marbles within the jar and hope they’re represntative of the whole jar.
Actual Placement – The final strategy you could employ is removing the shroud around the jar. You can’t see every single marble, but almost 70% of the marbles in the jar can be counted.

The choice is obvious. Why even consider any option but the third?

AudiencePoint’s Revolutionary Technology

AudiencePoint has launched a new technology that revolutionizes how you email. Understanding how your emails are being delivered is a need which has faced email marketers sense the first campaigns. Inbox Placement by AudiencePoint identifies where each email is landing, the inbox or the spam folder, a claim that no other technology can make.

What is Inbox Placement from AudiencePoint?

Inbox Placement from AudiencePoint determines at an individual address level which messages are landing in the inbox and which are landing in the spam folder for 65% of your audience. we have partnered with brands, ESPs, MTAs, and mailbox providers to answer the question “Which emails inbox?” This is NOT just a sample, this is actionable data on a per-email basis as it pertains to your specific email program.

Why was Inbox Placement Created?

The short answer is that the existing tools which have served our industry very well for a very long time are starting to lose their effectiveness. The mailbox providers are changing and the current toolset has some systemic limitations which prevent them from evolving to meet the needs of the industry.

What is Sender Reputation

Sender reputation is a construct created by the mailbox providers that associate your sending domain with key signals to arrive at a score that represents the type of emailer you are. If your sending domains start to reflect negative activity, you get the label of a “bad sender” and get placed in the deliverability “naughty corner.”

How is the Industry Changing?

Mailbox providers are getting increasingly sophisticated with their inbox technology. Inboxing is moving away from sender reputation and toward deliverability on a per-email basis. A brand could have perfect sender reputation, but all of their email still lands in their customer’s spam folders because inbox providers have moved the decisioning away from the sender and to the subscriber.

	Inbox Placement	Seed Lists	Panel Data
Reflects Sender Reputation
Split by Underlying Inboxing Rules
Identifies Where Emails are Delivered
Reflects Actual Email Placement
Requires Hiring a Consultant to Recover
Massive 65% Audience Coverage
Generates CSV of Emails Landing in Spam
Exportable Audiences to CRMs/ESPs for Actionability
Privacy Compliant
Historic Data Access and Analysis
Accuracy	Precise	Directional	Directioinal

A Quick History – What is Seed List Technology?

Seed list technology is based upon including a batch of email addresses that you programmatically monitor. By including a set (25-ish) of emails which you own, you can monitor if your messages are landing in their inboxes and project that onto your larger audience. The challenges to this approach are:

VERY small sample to base your deliverability on
Seed lists do not have real human email interaction profiles
Reflect only the directionality of a program
Only reflect sender reputation

What is Panel Data?

Panel data is based upon users installing an application that would give the author visibility into their inbox. Once such application was an unsubscribe manager which allowed the developer to see which emails you were subscribed to and remove any you didn’t want. These applications were a trojan horse and tracked which emails landed in the spam folder and which landed in the inbox. This data was then sold to marketers as a representative sample. There are challenges with this approach:

There is a bias to the type of consumer with the application installed
Increasing privacy regulations have greatly limited access to personal email information, exponentially increasing the degree of difficulty in collecting panel data
The sample size of panels is still incredibly small in comparison to average list sizes
Trojan horse applications can become irrelevant quickly
Still primarily only reflects sender reputation with a handful of real inbox placement results

Why is Inbox Placement from AudiencePoint Better?

Inbox Placement from AudiencePoint uses our email engagement clean room to make comparisons between sending brands. This comparison produces a signal that indicates whether a single email lands in the inbox or the spam folder. That single signal is collectable for 65% of US email consumers.

Conclusion

Deliverability has long been the bane of the email marketer’s existence. Marketers have relied on seed lists and representative samples to determine what is getting delivered, and it simply isn’t working anymore.

As the industry continues to progress, the limitations of seedlist and panel technology is beginning to negativly impact their programs with false signals. These monitoring limitations introduce the need for a better mousetrap. Inbox Monitoring by AudiencePoint is that better mousetrap, as it reflects individual email placement in individual inboxes, something that has never been done before.