To monitor your deliverability results, you must send your email campaigns to the Everest Seed List. Properly seeding your email campaigns to Everest is important because seeding shows you whether your emails are going to the inbox or spam or being blocked altogether.
Learn how sending to the Everest Seed List affects usage on your subscription.
Getting started
Implementing the Everest Seed List into your database may require the help of your internal database administrator or your email service provider (ESP):
- Contact your database administrator to identify the best approach for importing a tab-delimited flat file. To identify this segment in your database, Validity recommends adding a field or a value that allows your data administrator to manage these addresses separately from your core email data.
- Contact your ESP account team to identify their method for adding the Everest Seed List. ESPs have unique methods and processes for incorporating seeds, so it is important to know how your ESP handles Everest seeds.
Creating and managing your Everest Seed List
To create and manage your Everest Seed List:
- Sign in to Everest.
- Use the navigation menu at left to go to In-Flight, then Inbox Placement.
- Select the Manage Seed List tab.
Before you can download your seed list for the first time, you must select the regions that will be included. You can also optimize and weight your seed list at this time.
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Region Selection: Choose the regions to which your campaigns are sent, so that the seed list includes email addresses for those regions. If you are a B2B sender, you can also include email addresses for hosting companies, as well as filter companies that businesses use to more closely monitor incoming email.
- Seed List Optimizer and Seed Weighting will enable you to further personalize your seed list and ensure that the most relevant regions for your email program are correctly represented. If you do not choose to optimize or weight your seed list, the default seed list (after selecting the regions from the previous step) will be available for you.
Downloading your Everest Seed List
To obtain your Everest Seed List:
- Sign in to Everest.
- Use the navigation menu at left to go to In-Flight, then Inbox Placement.
- Select the Manage Seed List tab.
- Under the Download Seed List widget, select Actions at the top right of the widget.
- Choose either Download: CSV for a CSV file or Download: One Per Line for a text file.
Switch over to your ESP or sending platform to upload your seed list, using the guidelines provided by your ESP account team.
Sending your campaigns to the Everest Seed List
- Include the entire Everest Seed List in every email you want to monitor. Do not split or break up the list. If you send the same email to different list segments (for example, subject line testing), include the full Everest Seed List in each segment to monitor the deliverability results individually.
- Important: Your list contains four critical seeds. These seeds, located at the top of your list, are called reference addresses and are created specifically for your account so Everest can identify your campaigns. You must always include these reference addresses in your seed list for Everest to fully track and report all the seed results for your emails.
When testing your campaigns using the seed list, use placeholder data for merge fields. Please do not send tests with personal data (e.g., customer or subscriber email, name, user name, account number, etc.) in your merge fields, or associate customer data to seed addresses.
