Inbox placement is when your email communications land in the inbox instead of spam. Inbox placement is also a reflection of your sending reputation. Improving your sender reputation is crucial to fixing your deliverability, which can take time.
Below are recommendations that can help you repair your sending reputation.
Identify dates and possible causes
For example, do you recall when you first started to see a decline in your open rates? When did you notice a spike in spam complaints, or when you noticed your domain performing poorly?
Identifying these dates can help identify factors contributing to poor inbox placement.
Your reputation was likely hurt due to one or more negative events (high spam complaint rates, misconfiguration, introduction of new/poor lists, unexpected increase in volume, etc.). The more data you have, the easier it will be to pinpoint the causes and build a recovery plan.
You can use Google Postmaster Tools to check your domain reputation.
Slow down the frequency of your sends
To help improve inbox placement, we recommend pausing all email sends for one week. Doing so acts like a cool-down process for your domain.
Once you're ready to start sending emails again, we recommend sending them to contacts who clicked a link in your email within the last 30 days. You want to focus on these contacts first because they are engaged with your emails. Focusing on this segment helps boost your sender reputation and inbox placement. When you send emails to your engaged contacts, ensure that you don't send more than 25,000-50,000 emails in one day.
If you see improvements, you can try sending your email to contacts who opened or clicked your email within the last three months. As your domain reputation improves, you can start including contacts who engaged with your emails within the previous six months.
Remove unengaged contacts from your list
Contacts who have not engaged with your emails in 6 months or longer should be removed from your list, so they no longer receive your emails. Sending emails to unengaged contacts can contribute to poor domain reputation and inbox placement.
Again, you want to focus on sending to your engaged subscribers. This helps email service providers (ESPs) learn that your contacts want your email so they can start placing your email in the inbox.
We would recommend that you remove contacts from your list who have not opened or clicked any links in your email.
You can use the Engagement Management tool to remove unengaged subscribers from your list.
Make it easy for contacts to unsubscribe
Subscribers who no longer want to receive your emails may mark your message as spam if they cannot easily find your unsubscribe option. Therefore, we recommend adding the unsubscribe options to two places in your campaign: one at the top and one at the bottom. This makes unsubscribing from your emails easy.
Review your opt-in process
Make sure you are only sending content your contacts signed up to receive, and include the Captcha field (inline forms only) and double opt-in to your forms.
To avoid issues, send to opted-in addresses only and stay away from rented or purchased lists.
Personalize your campaigns
The more you personalize your campaign, the better. Most ESPs can identify language that is targeted to the recipient. This applies to using personalization in a subject line or "From" email address. The more you can target your message to the recipient, the more likely your email will be placed in the inbox.
To personalize your email, we recommend using personalization tags and conditional content.
Be patient
Repairing your sending reputation is possible, but it takes time, typically 30-60 days.