Email Inbox Placement 101

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If you give an email marketer a choice between successful inbox placement and a free box of chocolates, guess which one they’d pick? Jokes aside, inbox placement is one of the biggest challenges when it comes to email marketing.

If your brand has good inbox placement rates, you can rest assured that most of your emails are landing inside a customer’s inbox folder. If not, then it means that your emails land in the spam folder more often than inside the inbox. This could happen due to a variety of reasons, such as an inability to pass spam filters, low deliverability, low domain reputation, or other issues identified by your email service provider.

In this article, we’ll cover basic and advanced strategies for better inbox placement so your emails land in the primary inbox instead of customers’ spam folders.

What Is Inbox Placement?

Inbox placement refers to the percentage of emails delivered to the inbox folder rather than the junk or spam folder.

Inbox placement rate is indicative of email deliverability. It shows whether an email is successfully delivered or marked as spam. Inbox placement rate (also known as inbox delivery rate) is a key aspect of measuring your email marketing campaigns’ success.

What Happens When Your Inbox Placement Rate Is Low?

Low inbox placement means that a high proportion of your email campaigns land in the trash or spam folder. This means that your customers don’t even get a chance to see your emails before they decide whether to open, trash, or click on them.

Spam is where emails go to die. They’re never again going to see the light of day, and will be permanently deleted in a short period of time after they land in the spam folder.

When Do Email Service Providers Reduce Inbox Placement?

Typically, emails that land in the primary inbox come from a sender with a good sender reputation, are properly warmed up, and are being sent at a consistent cadence. If your emails are going to the junk or spam folders, it could be because of:

1. Lack of authentication
2. Emails sent without proper domain or IP warmup
3. Negative customer engagement like high spam complaints (>0.1%)
4. Low customer engagement like opens and clicks
5. A history of emails being sent to spam traps, invalid or purchased email addresses
6. Spammy or irrelevant content. Even if your sender’s reputation is good or high, content could get flagged as spam, resulting in emails going to spam.
7. Other reasons that caused mailbox providers to mark your email-sending behavior as spammy

This will directly impact your sender reputation and ensure that future emails also land in the spam folder. It’s a vicious cycle, so you should aim to fix your sender reputation on a priority basis to improve your inbox placement rates.

If your email-sending behavior is not optimal, emails will be sent to spam and will generate low engagement. This will lead to a drop in sender reputation, which will cause subsequent emails to go to spam and lower the inbox placement further.

How Do You Measure Inbox Placement?

Mailbox providers do not share inbox placement data directly. However, there are inbox placement tools and vendors like Inbox Monster, Validity, eDataSource, and so on who facilitate this by use of seed lists. Seed lists are email addresses created specifically to review inbox placement.

Seed lists can be taken as a sample. Based on the inbox placement of these sample addresses, inbox placement for the campaign can be predicted.

You can run inbox placement tests either before or during sending your email campaign to understand your inbox placement rate. You just need to find a suitable inbox placement tool to help you with the inbox placement tests.

Is Inbox Placement The Same As Sender Reputation?

No. Sender reputation is like a score (verdict?) given by ISPs (Internet Service Providers) to email domains and IPs to put a score on sending behavior. Gmail shares domain and IP reputation data in Google Postmaster, while Microsoft shares IP-filtered status in SNDS. You can also check domain reputation directly in MoEngage.

Sender reputation (specifically domain reputation) is shared by mailboxes directly, while inbox placement rate is deduced via tests through seed addresses.

Both inbox placement rate and sender reputation score provide insights on your email deliverability.

How to Increase Email Inbox Placement

Good inbox placement rate depends on a variety of factors like email authentication, trust, timing control, list maintenance, and relevance. Following best practices in all these categories will help you land in the recipient’s inbox, giving you more successfully delivered emails than spam complaints.

1. Email Authentication Protocols

Email authentication is a compliance requirement from mailbox providers. Customers also tend to react positively to emails from a source they trust, and this will help you pass the inbox placement test.

By authenticating your emails, you are letting mailbox providers know that your emails are legitimate. You can do so via the three key email authentication protocols: SPF (Sender Policy Framework), DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail), and DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance).

You can also use strict DMARC policies to prevent spammers from spoofing your domain.

Here are quick ways to ensure proper email authentication protocols so they don’t affect inbox placement:

1. Comply with all authentication protocols and compliance requirements.
2. Use an easily recognizable email address with a consistent sender name, crisp email subject line, clean formatting, and relevant content so that customers know the email is coming from a trusted brand
3. Maintain a valid reply-to address so that recipients know they can reach out at any time
4. Mention contact details in the email footer
5. Use BIMI (Brand Indicators for Message Identification) to maintain visual sender identity.

Sending authentication emails increases the chances of your emails landing in the primary inbox instead of the spam or junk folder. Email providers use authentication mechanisms to filter out good senders from spammers.

It’s critical to comply with basic authentication protocols (SPF, DKIM, and DMARC) to achieve good email deliverability.

2. Effective List Management

List management is a key aspect of avoiding spam filters and ensuring good inbox placement rate. Email service providers also appreciate lists that are constantly cleaned and updated.

To maintain good list hygiene, follow these steps:

1. Use clean list collection methods and provide double opt-in wherever possible
   • Don’t add email contacts without explicit permission from customers
   • Don’t scrape email addresses off of websites or any suspicious email program
2. Never purchase a mailing list
3. Periodically suppress inactive customers and email accounts

If you send emails to customers who haven’t explicitly consented to your emails, they will raise spam complaints, and this will impact your sender reputation.

If your audience list consistently includes high spam traps, outdated email addresses, invalid addresses, and unknown customers instead of a healthy mix of repeated and new customers, your sender score will drop, and your spam score will go up. Email service providers also look at your list quality to assess if you exhibit spammy behavior.

The email service provider will then lower your inbox placement rate, and your future email campaigns are more likely to be sent to spam and avoid the recipient’s inbox.

3. Segmentation and Personalization

Tailor your emails to suit individual needs and preferences instead of sending vague, generic emails. Analyze the customer’s journey and lifecycle stage, and personalize your email marketing campaigns accordingly.

At the same time, maintain proper sending patterns to ensure you are neither over-mailing (which can annoy your customers), nor under-mailing (which can lead to them forgetting about your brand). Use dynamic segmentations based on customer behavior and figure out the best timing to send emails on a personalized level. The number of emails you send to each customer should depend on their engagement levels.

A mailbox provider like Gmail will dynamically adjust inbox placement and primary inbox placement based on customer engagement.

Personalized emails perform much better than non-personalized ones and can increase the chances of your emails landing in the primary folder. Spam emails are usually non-personalized, so personalized emails automatically improve your inbox placement rates and don’t trigger spam filters too often. You can review our email benchmark report to understand the impact of personalization.

Also, be sure to always send a test email before publishing live campaigns. Sample customers can be used to test personalizations.

4. Email Relevance and Optimization

The most important aspect of a good email marketing campaign is its relevance. No matter how much you optimize your campaigns or how many are successfully delivered, your incoming emails need to be relevant to your customers.

Even if customers already have a high affinity towards your brand, if your emails are not engaging enough, they will react negatively to your delivered emails. To ensure that your brand gets all emails delivered to the inbox, you need to keep customer satisfaction high via positive reactions and engaging campaigns.

Be mindful about abruptly increasing the number of emails you send if your deliverability tools or inbox placement tools consistently show positive results.

Here are some ways to improve your email performance:

1. Use an interesting subject line and preview text. You can use AI to generate subject lines and preview texts.
2. Do not use misleading subject lines, as it results in losing trust.
3. Create attention-grabbing email marketing content with attractive images and GIFs
4. Keep your textual and visual language synonymous with your brand identity
5. Leverage extensive A/B testing to figure out the right timing, content, different subject lines, and other preferences
6. Keep up with email HTML basics: Make emails mobile-friendly, dark-mode friendly, make sure unsubscribe links and all other links are working, make the intent visible at first glance, and so on
7. Monitor email traffic and email practices, experiment, and keep adjusting as per signals from your recipients
8. Send regular test emails to your own email account often to get valuable insights into your email marketing program

How To Get Emails To Land In The Primary Folder In Gmail

Folders or Tabs are designed to suit the recipient’s needs. Not all consumers have tabs enabled for them. Also, tabs are exclusive to Gmail (and Microsoft to some extent, with ‘Focused’ and ‘Others’ tabs).

Emails are categorized based on the following:

• Sender’s reputation
• Usual customer interaction with the sender
• Usual customer interaction with similar content
• Individual recipient’s interaction with the sender
• Individual recipient’s interaction with similar content
• Settings saved by each individual

Promotional/Updates tabs are also part of the inbox. Promotional emails are supposed to land only in the promotional tab — where customers who read them will be in the proper mindset to interact with that type of content.

Forcing emails to primary folders is not a good practice as it could have negative repercussions like high unsubscribes, high spam complaints, and customers moving the email from the primary folder to another folder.

Usually, emails with interactive content, fewer or no images, links, lots of text, and detailed brand descriptions, which are sent to very active engagers over a period of time, tend to go to the Primary folder.

Similarly, even password reset instructions, if clubbed with promotional email content, can go to the promotions tab.

An inbox placement tool that shows email inbox placement and other sender benchmarks typically also gives insights on folder placement and email traffic. Inbox placement testing will give you all these results at once.

Keep in mind: If your promotional emails are going to the updates or primary inbox, do not change your sending patterns (like increasing the number of emails sent, changing the email content to include more promotional/marketing content, etc.) as this might risk penalization.

Wrapping Up

Inbox placement rate is a crucial metric for email marketers. This metric is indicative of the percentage of emails landing in the inbox and the number of emails with poor inbox placement.

Email marketers need to ensure good email delivery and inbox placement rate via best practices like email authentication, email verification, compliance with email provider standards, maintaining a legitimate email account, segmentation, and personalization. An inbox placement tool can prove to be valuable here.

Inbox placement goes hand-in-hand with email delivery and email deliverability, and a good email marketing platform should have inbuilt email deliverability tools available to help email marketers achieve a high inbox placement rate.

If you’re looking for a good email marketing platform, check out MoEngage Email.