What Is An Inbox Placement Test? How Can You Predict Email Deliverability?

When you put effort into the marketing emails you send, you want to ensure they land in your subscribers’ inboxes so they can actually see and engage with your content. However, there are several factors that can detract from the ability to land in primary inboxes. That’s why inbox placement monitoring is essential to email performance. 

This article will cover what inbox placement is, aspects of email marketing that affect placement, and the email address verification tools available that will help you succeed. Keep reading for all the details. 

What Is Inbox Placement For Email?

Email service providers and global mailbox providers are always advancing how they operate. That includes how they detect content as spam, (which you can look at with an email spam test). 

Inbox placement is essentially a way to understand if a significant portion of email content sent to your list is landing in spam folders. If you have a lot of content landing in spam, you’ll need to take steps to address it to avoid further complications that will harm the results you can achieve from your email marketing efforts.

That will often involve taking measures like strategies to boost engagement, cleaning up any fake emails on your list, and optimizing send times.

What Is The Inbox Placement Rate?

The inbox placement rate is a pretty simple calculation. It’s the percentage of emails that land in the primary inbox out of the total number of emails delivered to subscribers. This calculation excludes the emails that bounce from the calculation, which makes placement a bit different than email deliverability rate. You can test inbox placement with a variety of tools.

What Is An Inbox Placement Test?

An inbox placement test is a measurement of how likely your email will be to land in subscribers’ primary inboxes. Email inbox placement testing helps measure email deliverability and takes into account spam filters, how the content will be treated by major email providers, and the typical engagement metrics of your past content. 

What Is The Inbox Placement Rate Tool?

Inbox placement tools are how you would perform a placement rate test. Typically, these tools can help monitor your emails based on a variety of factors like spam ratings, if your DKIM, SPF, and DMARC are set up correctly, the type of content you’re sending, and more. 

While simple placement rate tools are relatively affordable, they do have some limitations that can affect the results you get with them. Primarily, you may notice that they track limited types of data to provide an estimate of inbox placement and don’t give you a ton of resources to actually help you achieve better placement. 

That’s why opting for an all-around email insight software like AudiencePoint can be a better option. AudiencePoint’s inbox monitoring tool don’t just rely on seed lists. Instead we’re able to leverage our second party data pool to give you insight as to if your emails are actually landing in their inbox.

What Affects Inbox Placement?

The main aspect that affects placement is spam detection. To protect users, email providers have algorithms to help predict whether the content is spam. So emails that use common spam words or that have consistently poor engagement can land in the spam folder. 

Other aspects like unsubscribes and user complaints can also affect placement. These factors, especially user complaints, can cause email providers to mark your emails as spam. That’s why it’s essential to use best practices when adding subscribers to your list and offer good value in your content. 

How Can I Improve My Inbox Placement?

Ways you can improve inbox placement results include:

• Send quality content: Offering value to your subscribers through your content is the best way to improve engagement and placement rates. Learn about what your subscribers’ wants and needs are, how your solutions fit in, and offer insightful solutions that can help. 
• Optimize send times: Another thing you can do is optimize the time you send content for when subscribers are most likely to engage. Our Send Time Optimization tool through AudiencePoint can help with this aspect. 
• Use a recognizable “from” address: Your “from” address should be clearly associated with your company or personal brand that will be familiar to subscribers. Before sending your first campaign, it can be a good idea to test to make sure your emails display right when subscribers receive them. 
• Improve subject lines: The subject line of emails has a significant impact on whether subscribers choose to click and engage with content. Try optimizing to clearly showcase the value your content offers to make subscribers want to know more. 

If you want to get additional insights on improving inbox placement and how you can make your campaigns more successful, AudiencePoint can help. 

How AudiencePoint Can Help You Test Email Deliverability

AudiencePoint is an email insight software that will give you actional insights to improve inbox placement, sender reputation, and overall engagement rates.

AudiencePoint’s tools work with all major inbox providers and will help you:

• Optimize send times
• Re-engage inactive subscribers
• Segment emails
• Verify the subscribers on your list
• Get real-time data
• Monitor your inbox placement

All these insights and more are displayed in actionable ways that help you improve your email campaigns for success. 

Contact us today to learn more about how AudiencePoint can help.