Seed Emails

In email marketing, this term describes an email address that is placed on a list — often secretly — to track delivery rate, and to assess the visible appearance of delivered email messages. As a single email, these communications allow marketers to gauge campaign deliverability and appearance as it will be seen by its list members rather than how it is seen before transmission.

Seed emails are messages that are ultimately sent to a seed list. This list is comprised of artificial email addresses which the email marketer owns. Software is leveraged to check these inboxes after a certain period of time and allows marketers to more efficiently monitor their different IPs and if their messages are getting through spam filters, as well as to determine if the emails sent go to the inbox’s junk folder, or if the emails are lost in transmission. If these results occur in the tester seed emails, it is likely to also occur for regular list members. In these cases, the email marketer will need to adjust its campaign to account for these results if they want to effectively reach their subscribers.