Our latest blog post for a new series on understanding inbox placement rates is from our very own Client Services Senior Director, Sophia Amador. With over a decade of experience in the industry, specializing in optimizing inbox placement, Sophia shares her expertise on the matter.
Many email marketers face challenges understanding what happens after they hit the send button of an email campaign. Having visibility to their email deliverability (inbox placement rate) and how to improve it are keys to any successful email program. I often find that the term ‘deliverability’ can have different definitions depending on your focus and goals.
Marketers equate ‘deliverability’ to…
Email Deliverability Specialists equate ‘deliverability’ to…
Let’s identify areas in email marketing that could impact inbox placement rate and key drivers to inbox placement success.
Let’s start with the facts…
As a marketer, how do you make sure your audiences are receiving all of your intended email campaigns? To begin with, we need to review all the areas which could affect your inbox placement rate. In Continuum’s upcoming Deliverability blog series, we’ll be taking a deep dive into each of these areas.
There is a common theme throughout – ENGAGEMENT. User engagement is the most important factor when focusing on delivering more emails to your audiences inbox. There are several ways which marketers can measure engagement of their users. See highlighted below.
- Open Rates
- Click Rates
- Conversion Rates
- Pages per Session
- Customer Satisfaction
- Customer Lifetime Value
With the introduction of the Apple Mail Privacy Protection, open rates have become less reliable over time. As an alternative, Litmus introduced a new metric called Email Quality Score, (original concept shared by Lucas Chevillard, back in 2021) that is gaining traction with many senders.
The Email Quality Score metric allows marketers to understand which emails are enjoyable to your end users versus those that are not as relevant to their current interests. This is another metric you can add to your arsenal of performance metrics like open, click, unsubscribe, and bounce rates to truly understand the overall health of your program but shouldn’t be something you rely on to solely optimize your program.
So where do you go from here?
If you don’t already have an active engagement analytics program in place, start a full program and deliverability audit by working with your data and analytics team to ensure the right performance metrics are being actively monitored. Use historical engagement data to identify highly engaged users within the previous 12-18 months, and optimize your overall strategy accordingly. Consider calculating your Email Quality Score on your top email programs. The more engaged users you can identify, the better your long-term inbox placement will be.
If you’re interested in better understanding your inbox placement rates or want to know more about email deliverability, please reach out to ContinuumGlobal. We work with clients to improve their deliverability including auditing their marketing programs and launching strategic strategies to ensure they are reaching their inboxing and engagement goals.