How To Calculate Inbox Placement Rate

Many email marketers will hear about the importance of inbox placement rates to ensure high levels of engagement during their campaigns. That said, you still may be wondering how to calculate inbox placement rate, is there an email address verification tool you should use, and how it fits in with the rest of your email marketing strategy. 

This article will provide everything you should know about inbox placement calculations, what affects it, and resources that can help. Keep reading for all the details. 

What Is Inbox Placement Rate?

Before we get into the finer details of inbox placement, let’s cover what it is to ensure everything else in this article makes sense. 

Inbox placement rate measures how many delivered emails make it to a recipient’s inbox, compared to how many emails land in spam folders. 

On top of that, some email testing tools that calculate placement may also account for the number of emails that land in sub-folders of the inbox, like “social” or “promotions,” that don’t get as much engagement as emails that end up in the primary inbox. 

What’s the Importance of Inbox Placement Rate?

Inbox placement test is important because it’s a more specific metric than deliverability. Email deliverability just accounts for how many emails land in any folder on a recipient’s email account. Emails that go to spam are still counted as “delivered” in the deliverability metric. 

Having a metric like inbox placement rate to take things a step further is a great idea because it provides further insights into where your content lands and how it impacts engagement. 

What Affects Inbox Placement?

Several factors affect inbox placement. Some of the common aspects are:

• The email’s content: The specific content of your email can make a difference in where it’s placed. That’s particularly common with providers like Gmail that sort content into sub-folders like “promotions.” If you’re creating content that would be considered by the provider as social, promotional, spam, etc., where it lands after delivery will change. 
• Engagement rates: Inbox providers aim to provide consumers with the best possible email reading experience. One of those aspects is ensuring they see the content they engage with the most. So if subscribers engage with many of your emails, they’ll likely land in their primary inboxes, achieving better placement rates. 
• Email list quality: When you have lots of subscribers on your list that aren’t verified or who were added without being properly notified, it can cause many problems with bounces or consumer complaints. It makes your content more likely to land in spam folders since it lowers your trust ratings with Inbox Providers. 

While these are a few primary factors, many other aspects can contribute, like email send times and email frequency. That’s why having the right email address verification tool in place that can provide you with all the insights you need is essential. 

How Do I Check My Inbox Placement?

The best way to check inbox placement is by using email testing tools that can help you calculate it automatically. 

When you use our tool ListFit through AudiencePoint, both inbox placement and deliverability are significant factors it tracks to ensure the best email engagement solutions are provided. ListFit will provide you with: 

• Accurate measurement of actual inbox delivery not just seed list data
• In-depth details on subscriber activity, optimized using second-party data
• When subscribers need to be re-engaged
• Accurate ways to segment your email list
• Insights on when to suppress dormant emails

All of these insights are given to you in actionable ways that are easy to implement into your existing strategy to help you boost engagement and inbox placement rates in a way that’s sustainable for the long term. 

How Can I Improve My Inbox Placement?

The best way to improve inbox placement is to use a combination of insight software like AudiencePoint and email marketing best practices. Here are a few solutions that can help:

• Optimize send times: The time you send content does impact engagement, so optimizing for when subscribers are most likely to check inboxes is essential. Our Send Time Optimization tool through AudiencePoint will provide everything you need to do this effectively. 
• Send content that adds value: The best way to ensure consistent engagement is always to send content that adds value based on your subscriber’s needs. If you’re wondering what types of content your audience engages with most, our tools at AudiencePoint can provide you with that data in real-time. 
• Clean up your email list: Having a verified email list full of active subscribers will set you up for success by reducing bounce rates and ensuring high engagement. If you need help re-engaging inactive subscribers or suppressing dormant emails, ListFit through AudiencePoint will provide the insights you need. 

Overall, taking these steps, among many other solutions that our insight software at AudiencePoint can provide, will help you improve placement and see more success in your email campaigns in the long run. 

What Is Email Inbox Placement Rate Formula?

The inbox placement rate formula is the number of emails that land in the primary inbox divided by the total number of delivered emails. Note that this equation isn’t for the number of emails sent but the emails delivered, so any content that bounces isn’t included in the placement rate calculation. 

What Is a Good Inbox Placement Rate?

Most email marketing statistics say that the average inbox placement rate for all industries is around 77-80%. Ideally, email marketers should be able to do much better than that with the right tools, so aiming for a 90% placement rate would be considered good, and 95%+ would be considered great performance. 

How AudiencePoint Can Help

If you want to increase inbox placement and email engagement rates, AudiencePoint has the right solution for your needs. Our insight software provides you with the right tools for success and actionable insights you can easily implement to improve your email campaigns. 

Our tools will provide accurate data in real-time, help you improve send times, and give you detailed insights about subscriber activity. Plus, we optimize with by using data others simply can’t offer. We use second-party data that gathers over 1.7 trillion data points weekly for more accurate consumer-based insights. 

All of these tools will provide you with the necessary data to help you reach your email marketing goals. Contact us today to learn more about how AudiencePoint can help.