Inbox Placement

Inbox Placement aka: Inbox Placement Rate. Inbox Placement / Total Sent = Inbox Placement Rate which is another metric which is a way for email marketers to determine deliverability based on inbox placement instead of on email bounce rates. The Inbox Placement Rate or IPR is calculated by taking the number of emails delivered directly to users inboxes divided by the total number of emails sent. This metric is a truer indicator of email delivery success when excluding hard bounces, IP blocks, and those delivered directly to junk or bulk folders.

Inbox placement can be improved with a positive sender reputation, which is based on past mailing reports, along with feedback from subscribers. The IPR can be further increased with positive engagement metrics that include opens, clicks, and subscribers including emails from the sender’s IP to their safe sender or trusted lists.

ReturnPath, reported that in the last few years, IPR, even for highly reputable companies who send out legitimate commercial emails, has been declining quite rapidly. They reported that one in five email marketing messages are being filtered or routed out of inboxes by a variety of major ISPs. One of the problems is that even an organization with a clean list and good to excellent reputation metrics but has a one percent hard bounce rate may experience a less than stellar IPR. Some of this is also do to ISPs that have significantly raised the bar on filtering and are using metrics that are generally unavailable to marketers through traditional back end deployment platforms and leveraging new data to determine spam from not-spam.