If you've ever downloaded or used one of those free tools or applications that sync with your email inbox and automatically unsubscribes you from email that you don't open very often, there's a chance your email data is actually being used by someone else's inbox placement test to determine where their messages land.
It’s impossible to know if an email actually hits the primary inbox, but these free tools might be working behind the scenes to acquire that data for someone else. It’s a controversial practice that we want to shed some light on.
In this episode, we talk about the ins and outs of inbox placement tests and how useful they are (if at all).
Main Takeaways
- There are so many factors influencing your inbox placement that it’s nearly impossible to know which one is the culprit. Suggestions can often lead to fruitless rabbit holes.
- There are two ways to figure out where your email is landing with inbox placement tools: 1) seed lists, which are fake addresses that populate data back into the tool you’re using, or 2) panel data, which are real people using a free application that is aggregating their data in the background. (Google banned this in March 2019.)
- Seed lists aren’t going to act in the same way as real subscribers because they are fake. This isn’t bad, per se, but it doesn’t offer much help to marketers.
- Don’t treat inbox placement tests as an authority, treat them as a supplement to other tools for increasing your open and deliverability rates. Be sure to look at your own data in conjunction with anything coming from an inbox placement test.
- Inbox placement tests can scan for basic issues like long urls, large images, or HTML problems. These are useful if you’re new to the game.
“It's good to know how to look at all of the data in front of you. And it's totally fine if inbox placement tests are part of that data you're looking at, but just make sure it's not all of the data you're looking at and treating it like it's 100% factual. ” ~ @alyssa_dulinLinks
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