How to improve my inbox placement?

Have you ever wondered why some of your emails end up in the spam folder while others land directly in the primary inbox? It all comes down to a concept called inbox placement.

In this article, we'll explain what can affect your inbox placement and how to improve it.

What can affect my inbox placement?

Several factors can influence your inbox placement. Some of them include:

• The domain you're sending from - its sender reputation, age, number of emails sent in the past, security settings, and whether you've verified that domain with your email marketing platform.
• The engagement metrics of your past campaigns - have your recipients engaged with your emails, or have you been receiving many spam complaints?
• Domain restrictions and internal filters set by your recipients - business domains especially, can have strict internal filters in place, making it more difficult to reach the inbox.
• The overall quality of your contact list - have all your contacts agreed to receive emails from you? Does your list include many inactive contacts?
• Your campaign content - certain content, wording, and links in your email subject or body can trigger spam filters.

Building your sender reputation

Sender reputation is a score that Internet Service Providers (ISPs, so Gmail, Yahoo etc.) use to measure how trustworthy and legitimate your email-sending practices are. It determines whether your emails are considered safe or suspicious. As such, it's one of the most important factors to consider when improving your inbox placement.

Here are the main steps you should take to build a strong sender reputation:

Verify your domain

Domain verification is a process that confirms you are the legitimate owner of the domain you are using to send emails from. It helps establish trust with ISPs. To verify your domain, you will need to place CNAME records provided by EmailOctopus into your Domain Name System (DNS) settings (this is usually where you've bought your domain).

However, it's important to note that domain verification is not a quick fix. It may not immediately affect all your subscribers' inboxes, with so many other things affecting sender reputation.

Warm up your new sending domain

If you want to start sending from a new domain (or a domain that has never been used for sending bulk emails), it's best practice to warm it up first. The warm-up process requires you to send to a small segment of your list first (preferably engaged contacts), and gradually increase the sending volume. Email clients can find it suspicious if lots of emails are sent from a brand new domain, as it's common practice among spammers. So this step is very important to avoid landing in spam and to build a good sender reputation.

Target your active subscribers

One effective strategy to improve your sender reputation is emailing the most engaged contacts on your email list after the domain verification. These contacts regularly interact with your emails and generate positive engagement, such as opens and clicks, which signals to ISPs that your emails are valuable to recipients. You can do that by using our segmentation feature to identify and target your most engaged contacts effectively.

Once you have established a positive engagement with your most engaged contacts, you can gradually include more contacts in your email sends. This strategy allows you to expand your reach and carefully monitor the engagement metrics of these new contacts while maintaining a high engagement level.

Clean your list regularly

Regularly cleaning your email list is critical for maintaining good inbox placement. Suppress inactive contacts from your list to improve the overall quality and engagement rates. Inactive contacts can include email addresses that no longer exist, spam traps, and repetitive soft bounces that are unlikely to receive or engage with your content. By keeping your list clean, you can maintain a healthy sender reputation and increase the chances of your emails reaching the intended recipients' inboxes.

Balance sends to engaged and unengaged contacts

There is no such thing as a 100% engaged list – there are always contacts who are brand new and haven't had a chance to create engagement or older ones who haven't engaged in a while, but may still want to receive your emails. To safeguard your sender reputation, it's important that you balance out sends to unengaged contacts with those to the engaged ones. You should aim for an overall 50% monthly engagement rate.

So, for instance, if 20% of your list is engaged and 80% is unengaged, that's a 1:4 ratio (for every engaged contact, there are four unengaged ones). So, to ensure a 50% engagement rate, for every email that you send to your unengaged contacts, you should send four emails to your engaged contacts.

Remember that improving your inbox placement is an ongoing process that requires attention to sender reputation, contact engagement, and list hygiene. Following these steps and adopting best practices can enhance your email deliverability and ensure your messages always reach the right audience.