Everest Inbox Placement Playbook: Beginner

• If you are a new Everest customer with no prior relationship with Validity, complete onboarding to ensure you are familiar with navigating and using Everest.   
• If you were a Return Path or 250ok customer and are moving to Everest, complete your migration process. 
• Ensure you have completed the Everest Basic Setup Guide. 

Important! Be sure you know the subscription allotments based on your service tier and plan according to your sending frequency. You can find your subscription information by navigating to: My Everest>Account Settings>Subscription.

• Inbox placement terminology 
• Common Inbox Placement challenges 
• Important metrics related to effective inbox placement 
• How using Inbox Placement fits into your process 
• Send your first campaign to Everest and review the Inbox Placement results
• What to do next 

• Delivered rate: The percentage of email the mailbox provider accepted for delivery. An email accepted for delivery does not mean it reached the inbox. 
• Inbox placement rate: The percentage of email placed into the inbox. 
• Open rate: The percentage of email opened by your subscribers. 
• Click rate: The percentage of subscribers that clicked on a link or call-to-action. 

Common sender challenges associated with inbox placement are: 

• We have a high delivery rate consistently at or above 98%, but our customers complain they do not receive our emails 
• We do not have insight into how we are doing at mailbox providers such as Gmail, Microsoft, and Yahoo
• We are sending more holiday email, but it is having minimal impact to our revenue

By using Everest’s Inbox Placement feature and fixing deliverability problems, senders see improvements in:

• Inbox placement rate 
• Delivered rate 
• Open rate 
• Click rate 

Please watch Email Essentials: Delivered vs. Inbox Placement Rate (video) for additional information. 

Open and click rates are directly affected by your delivered rate and inbox placement rate. The higher your inbox placement rate, the more likely a subscriber will engage with your email. 

From Everest

• Inbox placement rate 
• Delivered rate (ESP integration required)
• Open rate (ESP and Pixel integration required)

From your ESP

• Delivered rate 
• Open rate 
• Click rate 

A traditional email marketing process consists of three phases: Pre-Send, In-Flight, and Monitoring. Understanding deliverability performance metrics across the email ecosystem is vital to maximizing the return on your email investment.

Pre-send 

• Inform your email campaign strategy with Everest’s Competitive Intelligence 
• Plan campaign 
• Select target subscriber list  
• Design campaign 
• Validate subscriber list using Everest’s List Validation 
• Test campaign design using Everest’s Design & Content 

In-Flight 

• Send campaign to subscribers and the Everest seed list 
• View your campaign’s inbox placement, spam, and missing results using Everest’s Inbox Placement 

Monitoring 

• Monitor engagement metrics using Everest’s Engagement, your ESP, or internal sending platform. 
• Monitor sending reputation metrics using Everest’s Monitoring to understand the deliverability impact. 
• Monitor DMARC compliance to identify unauthorized use of your domain and brand using Everest’s Infrastructure feature. 

Before you get started, be sure you have completed the Everest Basic Setup Guide for: 

• Seed list optimizer and seed weighting  
• Setting up your seed list

Please refer to your ESP or sending platform’s instructions for adding seed addresses.  

Send tests to the seed list from each IP address, domain, and message type 

It’s important to send tests from your sending system for each IP address, domain, and message type to ensure everything is working properly. If you have a small number of allotments available, send a single test from your IP and domain used the most frequently or that has the highest daily volume. You don't want to use up all of your allotments on tests.

If you only have one IP address and already sent a successful seed list test, move on to the next step to send your campaign. 

For the tests: 

• Use a subject line named:  <your company name> Everest seed list test for <date> 
• How to send email campaigns to the Everest Seed List 

Send your next campaign to the seed list 

As you complete your pre-send process, it is time to send your campaign and monitor the inbox placement results. 

1. Login to your ESP or sending platform 

2. Select your campaign and target list of valid subscribers 

• Be sure that the entire list of Everest seed addresses is included in your target list of valid subscribers 
• It is preferred to mix in the seed addresses with your actual target subscriber list. But, if you can’t mix them in to your list, put the seed addresses at the end of your list. 

3. Send your campaign from your ESP or sending platform 

4. Login to Everest 

5. Navigate to In-Flight and click on Inbox Placement 

6. View your campaign results on the Overview tab 

• It may take up to an hour for data to be collected from the seed addresses 

7. Click on your campaign’s subject line to view results by mailbox provider. 

8. Use the color codes under the Inbox Placement column to identify problems quickly. 

• Green = inbox 
• Orange = spam 
• Red = missing 

• If you see a lot of missing seeds, it is possible that the data has not finished processing. Wait 30 minutes and check again. 

9. Look for mailbox providers with high spam or missing %.  

• If the mailbox provider showing high spam or missing percentages comprises a large portion of your list, troubleshooting is a higher priority than a mailbox provider comprising a smaller portion of your list. If you encountered any deliverability issues, do your best to troubleshoot and fix the cause before sending out your next campaign. 

For assistance in troubleshooting deliverability issues, please read: 

• Tips for troubleshooting mailbox provider deliverability problems 
• Troubleshooting tips for transactional email spam folder placement 

10. Click on Mailbox Provider Health for a quick view into deliverability across all of your campaigns and compare your performance against the Everest community. 

1. Start sending your campaigns to the Everest seed list and monitor the results for deliverability problems. Prioritize troubleshooting mailbox providers that comprise a larger portion of your subscriber list.

2. Proceed to the intermediate inbox placement playbook.

• Everest Inbox Placement Playbook: Intermediate

3. Continue reading our other Everest playbooks to help take your email marketing program to the next level.  

•  Everest Playbooks