Your inbox placement can be one measurement of how well you are delivering. On it’s own, it is not an indicator of good or bad deliverability, but understanding how you are inboxing is an important first step. The first indicator is open rates below a normal range. The next is understanding opens per email service provider (ESP).
What is tracking opens per provider?
Tracking opens per ESP means not just knowing your overall open rates, but knowing your Gmail open rates, your Outlook open rates, your AOL open rates, and so on.
A report would look like this:
| Overall Opens | Gmail Opens | AOL Opens |
| 33.4% | 32% | 25% |
This is not something any email marketing software is currently reporting for you–this is a metric that will require custom reporting. In our experience, it has been the most effective way for us to diagnose issues and monitor the deliverability health of a list.
How can it help me?
We worked with a client who was seeing a drop in open rates, and we couldn’t see anything in his email marketing provider’s reporting to point to an issue, and the dip wasn’t significant enough to trigger deliverability concerns.
We pulled open rates per email provider and found that there were 2 emails AOL/Comcast subscribers opened at 1-2%–an indication that there was a serious problem. Meanwhile, Gmail remained consistently between 20-25%, which explains why the overall open rates weren’t dropping enough to cause alarm bells.
We run these reports for our clients all the time to help diagnose and fix deliverability issues. Work with us to get one of your own!
This kind of data is invaluable because each email provider has slightly different rules and quirks. Knowing which email provider is causing you trouble means we know how to fix it.
Do I have to optimize for every provider?
We believe it’s important to know the general makeup of your list, and optimize for what is most prevalent. When you know that your Subscribers primarily use Gmail, or that they are based on Europe, you can make decisions about your design and content based on how those providers deliver.
A quick search of my list shows me Gmail is 60% of my list (and this doesn’t include anyone using their own domain with Gsuite). This means Gmail is the provider I should think about most when it comes to deliverability and strategy, things like understanding their goals for my subscribers, their rules for engaged subscribers and spam triggers.
When I’ve done this search for clients before, Gmail is also about 60% of US-based senders, so if you’re unable to do the search yourself, you can use that as a good rule of thumb.
What should I do next?
- Figure out the makeup of your list.
- Start tracking open rates per ESP.
If your Email Marketing Provider can’t help you with these, we can. Book a free call with us to find out how we can help you get control of your email reporting!