Sales reps running email outreach campaigns want to reach prospects’ inboxes. Failing to do so, as in landing in spam, would lead to their outreach being nipped in the bud. And that means you don’t book meetings, and you don’t close deals.
Your inbox placement is therefore crucial in understanding the first step of your outreach effectiveness: if you are reaching inboxes at all.
It sounds simple, but it’s more complicated than you think. Most email providers have strict algorithms through which your emails pass before reaching your prospects. The algorithms will look at the contents of your email, email engagement feedback, and your email reputation as a whole to decide where to land your email.
For eg., Gmail has the following tabs – Primary Tab, Social Tab, Promotions Tab, and Updates Tab. The algorithm analyzes everything from the content of the email to the recipient’s engagement feedback to place the emails in different tabs.
But as an email sender, you’re not sure what tab your emails are landing in. So, you’re essentially shooting in the dark and hoping it reaches your prospect’s primary inbox. Which is not ideal for your outreach efficiency.
The solution is to know the rate of your Inbox Placement.
Here’s introducing Klenty’s Inbox Insights to help improve your inbox placement rate.
What is Inbox Placement?
Inbox Placement rate is based on deliverability and is used to determine the percentage of the emails sent that reached the prospects’ primary inbox.
Inbox placement is calculated by dividing the total number of emails reaching prospects’ primary inboxes by the number of emails delivered.
Note: This excludes any emails that didn’t get delivered at all, such as hard bounces.
Inbox Placement = Email delivered to primary inbox/Total no. of emails delivered
It is the deciding factor that indicates whether you can or can’t reach your prospects’ inboxes. Therefore, it is crucial that you know how healthy the score of your inbox placement truly is.
Without this knowledge, you may continue sending emails without fixing the issue, and then wonder why your open and response rates are low.
What Are the Factors That Affect Your Inbox Placement Rate?
There are 4 important factors that will have an impact on the placement of your emails in your prospects’ primary inboxes.
1. Recipient Engagement
When prospects receive emails, they perform both positive and negative engagements with the emails. Positive engagements are reading emails, replying, starring emails, and moving emails to a different folder. Negative engagements include marking as spam, deleting without reading, not opening the email, and so on.
Fewer of your emails will be delivered to a prospect’s primary inbox if they engage with them less positively or negatively.
2. Email Content
The algorithms check everything in the email to decide where to place it in the prospect’s inbox. This includes the header, body copy, attachments, images, videos, URLs, HTML code, HTML tags, and so on.
- Draft your email template carefully. Avoid being overly sales-y, using spam words, and having too many exclamation points ‘!!!!’, CAPS, multiple colours, and overusing HTML.
- Having attachments usually have a negative impact on deliverability. If you need to, then upload it to Google Docs/ Dropbox and share the link.
- In general, short URLs and any form of link tracking tend to have an impact when your recipient has advanced spam filters.
3. Email Authentication
If you are setting up an SMTP server on dedicated IP using a service provider like SendGrid, RackSpace, or any proxy servers, it is quite important to set up your email infrastructure details.
Your email infrastructure includes the configuration of your IP address, and domain, and setting up DKIM, SPF, and DMARC email authentication.
4. Sender Reputation
The reputation of your domain depends on the prospect’s engagement with your emails and on the number of emails the spam filters are marking as spam. The more positive actions prospects take on your emails, the more your domain reputation will increase, and the chances of your emails being placed in your prospects’ inboxes increases.
The different categories of sender reputation are generally:
a) Bad — Sending an enormously high volume of spam emails. Emails sent from such a domain will almost always be rejected at SMTP or sent to Spam Folder.
b) Low – Sending a considerable volume of spam emails to their email list regularly. Emails from these senders will likely be sent to Spam.
c) Medium — Sending a low volume of suspicious emails or spam intermittently. Most of the emails from this domain will have a fair deliverability rate.
d) High — Sending genuine emails and has a good record of low spam rate. Emails from this domain will rarely be marked by the spam filter.
How Inbox Insights Can Help Improve Your Inbox Placement?
Inbox Insights is a diagnostic tool to help you understand your inbox placement health.
With Inbox Insights, you will be able to:
- See exactly where your emails are landing
- View the domains that have blocked you
- Understand deeper technical factors related to your inbox health
- And know the exact next steps to improve your deliverability
Essentially, Inbox Insights eliminates the uncertainty related to your email placements. It also gives you clarity on your overall inbox health, with detailed reports on your deliverability markers.
a) Run Deliverability Tests
When you are running sales email campaigns, the reputation of your domain will increase or decrease based on the prospects’ engagement. This will have an impact on deliverability. Therefore, it is critical to monitor your inbox placement regularly and see exactly where your emails are being delivered each month.
Using Inbox Insights, you can run deliverability tests manually or schedule the test to be run automatically every week or month to find your inbox placement rate. You will be able to see a percentage view of emails sent to primary inboxes, spam folders, other tabs like Promotions or Social, or undelivered.
b) Deliverability Improvement Suggestions
If your inbox placement rate is low, you will have to rectify the issues at the earliest. But deliverability is more often than not a complex web of related issues that are really difficult for salespeople to figure out.
With Inbox Insights, sales reps will be given suggestions on how to improve deliverability. Suggestions include how to maintain reputation and some best practices to follow.
c) Detailed Technical Analysis
There are various technical details like email authentication, sender score, and domain blacklist that affect the inbox placement rate. It is impossible to keep a tab on these factors for salespeople manually.
Using Inbox Insights, all these technical details can be viewed in a single panel. You can find information about:
- Your email authentication records (SPF, DKIM, DMARC)
- Your sending IP’s’ Sender Score
- Where your IP is block-listed
- Your email’s spam score for Google Spam Filter and SpamAssassin
You will be able to see an explanation of what each check means, its importance, and relevant recommendations to improve.
d) Email Service Provider Reports
Each Email Service Provider like Gmail, Outlook, Office 365, or more uses a different, ever-changing algorithm when determining your email deliverability. It is important for salespeople to maintain a good inbox placement rate for all the major email service providers.
With Klenty’s Inbox Insights, you will get insights into four major email recipient providers — Google, Outlook, GSuite, and Office365. You will be able to see the percentage breakdown of your deliverability with each of these providers, and the next steps to improve your sender reputation with each provider.
Conclusion
Deliverability is a result of many co-existing factors, some of which are content-related, and others technical. While every SDR knows to tailor their content based on their prospect, some of the technical aspects can be confusing and daunting.
Therefore, tools like Klenty’s Inbox Insights are crucial in simplifying and visualizing your inbox health in one view. Knowing exactly where your emails land — in inboxes, spam, promotions, or if they’re undelivered — can help you understand what needs to be done to fix these issues, and by extension, improve your open rates.
Start your 14-day free trial of Klenty and try out Inbox Insights today.
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