If the Postal Service had a garbage can at its facility and threw all junk mail in it every time it received a piece, would you call that delivered? Of course not! Strangely enough, though, in the email marketing industry, any email delivered to the spam folder is counted as delivered!
As a result, email providers tout their deliverability scores as if they’re something to be proud of. Unfortunately for their customers, though, the sender’s reputation, the quality of the recipient addresses at each domain, and the email content may produce terrible inbox placement for marketers. This isn’t something they report, though.
That’s why companies enlist the services of inbox placement platforms. These deliverability testing platforms provide senders with seed lists that are monitored to see whether the campaign makes it into the inbox or the spam folder. This gives the marketer all the necessary reporting to troubleshoot and correct deliverability issues – list quality, content quality, or infrastructure issues.
Let’s define deliverability rate and inbox rate in the context of email marketing.
- Deliverability Rate: Deliverability rate is the percentage of sent emails that successfully reach the recipient’s email server or inbox without bouncing or being marked as spam.
\([\text{Deliverability Rate} = \frac{\text{Number of Emails Delivered}}{\text{Number of Emails Sent}} \times 100\%]\)
- Inbox Rate: The inbox rate is the percentage of sent emails that land in the recipient’s inbox rather than being routed to spam or other folders.
\( \text{Inbox Rate} = \frac{\text{Number of Emails in Inbox}}{\text{Number of Emails Delivered}} \times 100\%]\)
These two metrics are essential in email marketing to measure the effectiveness of your email campaigns and ensure that your messages reach the intended recipients’ inboxes.
250ok likes to call this the true deliverability rate. Monitoring this placement can mean thousands of dollars in increased open, click, and conversion rates to email marketers.
