What is Inbox Placement Monitoring? (Benefits & Tips)

In this article, we'll explore what inbox placement monitoring entails, how it can boost your email campaigns, and some best practices to improve deliverability.

We'll also introduce you to an effective tool for tracking and boosting your inbox placement.

This Article Contains:

• What is Inbox Placement Monitoring & How to Go About It?
• 5 Compelling Reasons to Monitor Your Inbox Placement
• 4 Smart Tips to Boost Your Inbox Performance
• How Allegrow Can Help You Monitor and Boost Inbox Placement

Let's get started.

What is Inbox Placement Monitoring & How to Go About It?

Inbox placement monitoring is a process that tracks how many sent emails land in prospects' primary inboxes. It's a vital metric to assess the efficacy of your email outreach strategy.

You can measure it by measuring inbox placement rate (IPR)  — a vital email deliverability metric.

Inbox placement rate (or inbox rate) is the percentage of emails you send out that successfully reach the recipient's primary inbox vs. their promotions, updates, or even the spam folder.

Is IPR the same as the email delivery rate?

While they're often used interchangeably, the delivery rate differs from IPR. 

The delivery rate tracks the percentage of emails reaching your prospects' mailboxes — in their inbox, spam, or another folder. IPR, on the other hand, only focuses on emails reaching your recipient's primary inboxes.

Here's a formula to calculate IPR:

Inbox Placement Rate = (Number of Emails Delivered to the Inbox / Total Number of Emails Sent) x 100

Unfortunately, unlike delivery rate, IPR can be tricky to measure accurately, especially when you send emails in high volumes from multiple domains.

This is because mailbox providers don't give you reliable data on whether an email landed in the inbox or spam folder.

This is where a professional email deliverability tool (deliverability services) can help.

An effective inbox placement monitoring tool will have a seed email list (test email addresses) and other predictive features, like a spam test, to estimate where an email will be delivered to.. 

With the insights from these inbox placement tests, you can monitor your email performance more accurately.

But how do you interpret IPR numbers?

A healthy email campaign can have an IPR as high as 98%. If your businesses engage in cold email campaigns or sales emails, aim to keep your IPR above 90%.

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An IPR lower than 80% may hint towards an underlying deliverability issue that you should resolve as soon as possible.

But why monitor your inbox placement rate in the first place?

5 Compelling Reasons to Monitor Your Inbox Placement

The five ways tracking IPR can benefit your email campaigns are:

1. Maximize Conversions

People mostly ignore emails in their promotions or updates folders. Emails that land in your priority inbox will have the maximum open and click rates. 

So landing in the priority inbox is key to maximizing email performance and conversion rates.

Inbox placement monitoring helps track if your emails reach the priority inboxes and take timely action if they aren't.

2. Keep Your Spam Rate in Check (Manual Reports)

A rise in spam rate that goes unnoticed could affect your sender reputation in the long run. And sender reputation has a big impact on your email deliverability and inbox placement.

Find out how inbox placement differs from email deliverability.

A poor sender reputation can make it harder for your emails to reach the inbox, leading to lower open and click-through rates. This, in turn, can derail your cold email outreach and email marketing efforts.

But when you track your inbox rate, you'll also have insight into what your spam rate could be and how the sentiment of your prospect towards your campaigns is developing over time.

If you see a sharp decline in sender reputation, you can take timely action to optimize your email list and any outreach campaign to avoid further manual spam reports. As these reports going unchecked can seriously damage your sender reputation in the long run and even cause your accounts to be suspended. 

Note: The industry standard for spam complaints is anything less than 0.1%, or one complaint for every 1,000 messages sent.

3. Spot and Resolve Email Deliverability Issues Sooner

When you track where your emails are landing and how they're being handled by different email verification services and ISPs, you'll notice deliverability patterns and trends.

Equipped with these insights, you'll be able to pinpoint email performance issues sooner.

For instance, you can identify whether the spam filter of an inbox provider is blocking your emails and the specific triggers causing them to be flagged as spam. You can then tweak your email content or sending practices accordingly.

You may also notice a deliverability issue due to a technical reason – like a problem with the email server or DNS configuration – that's causing your emails to be blocked or filtered.

When you monitor inbox placement via an advanced email deliverability tool, you also get vital insights into spam algorithms, your domain reputation, content, sending patterns, and much more.

Theses inbox insights can help you:

• Make your email content more relevant and engaging.
• Optimize your email sending rate and time.
• Understand how spam filters of different ISPs work.

Once you fine-tune your strategy based on these insights, your emails have a higher chance of reaching your prospects' inboxes. This will eventually lead to better open and response rates and more conversions.

4. Onboard SDR Hires Successfully

Hiring new SDRs may swell up your cold email volumes. You may also find newer SDRs receive lower engagement than existing users.

This is because their email accounts have less of a track record and existing reputation from sending emails, and are therefore perceived to be ‘riskier’ by email providers and get filtered more aggressively as a result. 

As these new hires may not be adept at building engagement with the prospects from the get-go you’ll want to steadily increase sending volume on their accounts.

It's vital to ensure during onboarding that new SDRs are able to build sender reputation effectively on their accounts during onboarding, so they reach the engagement levels you’ve modelled the go-to-market process on. 

Tracking inbox placement and providing each SDR with a deliverability solution (like Allegrow), will help them to build sender reputation faster and reach high engagement over email. 

5. Sell to Larger Accounts

Mid-market and enterprise businesses typically have stronger spam filter algorithms and firewalls, making deliverability more challenging.

Tougher filtering combined with the fact there are less enterprise accounts to reach-out to means you can’t use additional volume to solve an issue with engagement. In fact, because filtering works at a ‘company level’ failing to monitor and optmize inbox placement can mean entire businesses on your enterprise target customer list, become impossible to get engagement from. 

Therefore, by tracking and maintaining a high inbox placement, your SDR team can improve the viability of email as a channel to move up the market and ensure their approach is sustainable quarter after quarter. 

What else can you do to boost placement?

4 Smart Tips to Boost Your Inbox Performance

Here are four best practices to optimize your email campaign:

• Tip 1: When assessing your email performance track open rate, click-through rate, and response rate, to consistently remove the least engaged segments of contacts from your outreach process. 

• Tip 2: Avoid using misleading subject lines in your cold emails to reduce manual spam reports from prospects

• Tip 3: Refrain from contacting too many employees at one company in a short space of time. By contacting a single target decision maker at a time, you avoid spam flags and the risk of the same decision marker being forwarded multiple version of the same email. 

• Tip 4: Use professional email deliverability software with tools to gauge pre-send, in-flight, and post-send inbox placement rates.

Interested in learning more about that last tip?

How Allegrow Can Help You Monitor and Boost Inbox Placement

Allegrow is a deliverability platform designed to help you with inbox monitoring and placement.

How is Allegrow different from other popular email marketing and deliverability services?

Allegrow focuses on improving the performance of cold email outreach campaigns. It's different to email marketing tools, like Campaign Monitor, which help marketers send promotional emails to existing subscribers. 

Allegrow interacts with mailboxes to boost domain reputation and improve the chances of your cold and marketing emails reaching the prospects' inboxes.

Deliverability monitoring software typically uses a seed email list (test email addresses set up or purchased in bulk by the monitoring provider) to predict inbox placement. 

In contrast, Allegrow has a premium network of real B2B email addresses that allows an SDR to gauge the percentage of the email traffic reaching the primary inbox of prospects.

Here's how Allegrow uses inbox placement tests (like a spam test) and other cutting-edge technologies for inbox monitoring and optimization:

• Allegrow executes several unique actions daily to make your email account behave like a real human. This prompts every email service provider to direct your emails to priority inboxes.

• Allegrow marks emails sent from your account as important. Allegrow's network then responds to these emails. This boosts your domain's reputation and signals ISPs and inbox provider services that your emails are relevant to the receivers.

• Allegrow's community accounts track where your emails land and monitor changes to your domain reputation. This gives you a reliable platform to monitor your inbox and spam rates and how your outreach strategy affects them.

• It automatically checks your connected emails for SPF, DKIM, and DMARC authentication every hour. These protocols help establish the credibility of your emails at the receivers' end.

Note: Allegrow improves sender reputation on the domain not only the IP address in isolation. (designed for businesses which have SDR teams conducting cold outreach)

Key Features

Here are some features Allegrow offers:

• Interactive dashboard to track spam score and domain reputation for multiple emails within Allegrow.
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• A/B testing of your content to determine which emails are least likely to land in the spam folder.

• Gives actionable insights into how you can optimize your mailbox.

• Increases your email interactions in a regulated manner and displays a daily record of your sending patterns.

• Leaderboards show which of your individual mailboxes are performing well and which of them need to be optimized further.

Monitor Your Inbox Placement With Allegrow

Inbox placement monitoring is an essential process that helps you make the most of your cold email campaigns.

Pair your cold email outreach strategy with a specialized tool like Allegrow to get vital inbox insight and spot email deliverability issues sooner.

Sign up for Allegrow today to start tracking and optimizing your inbox placement.

The success of your cold email campaign depends on how often your emails reach the recipient's primary inbox.

This is where inbox placement monitoring comes in. 

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