.svg)
Advanced Deliverability - Lesson 6
.svg)
.avif)
This certificate would look great on you.
Complete a short quiz and it’s all yours.
Monitoring and Metrics: Keeping Your Finger on the Deliverability Pulse
Deliverability is not static. Your reputation, inbox placement, and sending health change over time in response to your actions and external factors. Regular monitoring allows you to catch problems early, before they escalate into serious deliverability crises. This lesson covers the key metrics to track and the tools you can use to track them.
Essential Metrics to Monitor
Bounce rates tell you how many of your emails failed to deliver. High bounce rates indicate list quality problems and damage your sender reputation. Monitoring bounces by type helps you distinguish between permanent failures like invalid addresses and temporary issues like full mailboxes.
Spam complaint rates measure how often recipients mark your emails as spam. This is one of the most heavily weighted signals in reputation calculation. Even a small percentage of complaints can significantly impact deliverability. Keeping complaint rates below industry thresholds is essential for maintaining good standing.
Open rates and reply rates, while not direct deliverability metrics, serve as proxy indicators of inbox placement. If your messages land in spam, nobody opens or replies to them. Declining engagement metrics often indicate deliverability problems even before you see issues in other monitoring.
Inbox placement rates measure where your emails actually land. This metric directly answers the question of whether your emails reach the primary inbox, the promotions tab, spam, or get blocked entirely. Regular inbox placement testing provides the clearest picture of your deliverability health.
Tools for Monitoring
Google Postmaster Tools provides free insights into how Gmail views your domain. You can see spam rates, domain reputation, authentication success rates, and delivery errors. Every cold outreach sender should have Postmaster Tools configured for their sending domains.
Microsoft SNDS, the Smart Network Data Services, offers similar functionality for Outlook and Microsoft-hosted recipients. Between Postmaster Tools and SNDS, you cover the majority of business email users.
Deliverability platforms like Instantly.ai include built-in monitoring features. Dashboard metrics show your sending patterns, engagement rates, and account health indicators. Inbox placement testing tools let you periodically check where your messages land across different providers.
Third-party deliverability monitoring tools provide additional depth if you need it. These tools offer comprehensive testing, historical tracking, and alerting features that help large-scale senders stay on top of their deliverability.
Building a Monitoring Routine
Having access to monitoring tools accomplishes nothing if you do not use them regularly. Building a monitoring routine ensures you catch problems before they become severe.
Daily checks should include glancing at your campaign metrics for any obvious anomalies. Sudden drops in open rates or unusual bounce spikes warrant immediate investigation. These quick checks take just a few minutes but can save you from extended deliverability problems.
Weekly reviews should go deeper. Check your Postmaster Tools and SNDS data for any changes in reputation or spam rates. Run inbox placement tests to verify your messages are still landing where they should. Review your sending patterns to ensure you are staying within healthy ranges.
Monthly analysis should look at trends over time. Are your metrics improving or declining? Are certain domains or inboxes performing worse than others? This bigger-picture view helps you identify gradual changes that might not be obvious day-to-day.
Responding to Warning Signs
When monitoring reveals potential problems, swift action prevents small issues from becoming major crises. If spam rates spike, pause sending from affected accounts until you identify the cause. If inbox placement drops, review recent changes to your content, lists, or sending patterns.
The key is to respond proportionally. Minor fluctuations are normal and do not require dramatic action. Significant changes or sustained negative trends deserve attention. Learning to distinguish between normal variation and genuine warning signs comes with experience.
Document your findings and responses. Keeping records of deliverability issues and how you resolved them builds institutional knowledge that helps you handle future problems more effectively.
Video transcript
So once you've set everything up, how do you actually know where your emails are landing? That's where inbox placement tests come in. These tests send sample emails to a network of test inbox across Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo and others to check where your emails land inbox, promotions or spam. You can run one time tests when setting up a new domain or schedule automated recurring tests to manager over time.
This gives you visibility into your domain health before your metrics start dropping. If placement starts trending towards spam or promotions, you'll know early and can fix it, often before it impacts your live campaigns. It's like running diagnostics on your car before a long trip. You want to make sure everything's running smoothly before hitting the gas.
For larger senders, automated placement reports are a must have. They make sure your entire sending system stays healthy while you scale.
Resources
Courses
.svg)
Prompts
%20(1).svg)
Unlock the power of AI
with
Get started now to access exclusive templates and elevate your projects to the next level.
Stop letting poor deliverability kill your pipeline. Join 50,000+ sales teams who've made the switch to Instantly for better inbox placement, higher response rates, and more closed deals.
No credit card required.