The state of Inbox Placement 2017

The Relevancy Group, in conjunction with eDataSource, has just released The State of the Inbox report, which collects responses from 350 email marketing companies in the United States on questions such as which tactics are used to optimise deliverability, the use of dashboards to measure email marketing performance, and the use of email marketing as a means of measuring email performance. inbox placement o the impact of improved deliverability on overall results.

Seed lists vs Panel Data
The main question that the study seeks to answer is which method of measuring the inbox placement (seed list or panel data), is the most widely used and which of them generates the best results. But before we go any further, let's see what the two methods mentioned above consist of.
As we explained in a previous postthe inbox placement estimates which % of the emails delivered to the mail provider have been placed in the inbox and which % have been placed in the spam folder.. Note that this information is not provided by default by ESPs, whose deliverability metrics only indicate how many emails have been bounced, i.e. not delivered. Inbox placement solution providers use two methods to determine where delivered emails will be placed: seed lists and panel data.

• What is a Seed List?
  These are mailing lists of different ISPs created by the inbox placement service companies. These addresses are included in each mailing that is sent, and using specific tools, the service companies can determine whether the emails that are received enter the spam folder or the inbox. The information extracted is processed to generate dashboards to visualise the level of inbox placement. Companies such as Return Path, 250ok o eDataSource offer this service, with seed lists of email providers and ISPs from all five continents.
• Panel data.
  Some of the service companies mentioned above have gone a step further and monitor millions of inboxes of real recipients (the owners of these inboxes have agreed to participate in the research). This makes it possible to recognise, not only where the mails are placed, but also how users "really" behave when they receive email marketing campaigns (who opens the emails, how they interact, which campaigns work best, how many baas are produced, etc.). From this point of view, the information is richer. Return Path and eDataSource offer such dashboards.

Going back to The Relevancy Group's study, it indicates that the average delivery rate in the inbox is 87%. With a monthly average of the study participants of 33 million emails sentmeans that close to 52 million emails are not delivered correctly after one year. By sector, those with the lowest inbox placement rates are Real Estate, Finance and Media and Advertising.