The Email Metric All Marketers Must Pay Attention to: Inbox Placement Rate

Open rates, click-through rates, bounce rates and unsubscribe rates are among the most common email metrics mentioned in studies and discussions amongst email marketers. But there’s one email metric that deserves more attention: inbox placement rate (IPR).

What is IPR?
IPR is “the rate at which emails land in the inbox folder as opposed to the spam folder or not delivered,” according to Tami Forman, senior director of global corporate communications for email intelligence company Return Path. At a recent presentation at Integrated Media Week in New York, Forman noted that the IPR is different from the “delivered” metric (emails sent minus bounces) marketers may see in their reports.

According to Return Path, nearly 23 percent of legitimate emails never hits consumer inboxes. The average IPR in the U.S. is 87 percent, while 8 percent of emails go to spam folders and 5 percent go missing. Forman noted that this is just an average, and that her company has seen plenty of clients with IPRs around 50 percent.

Forman said that IPR presents an especially difficult challenge for B2B companies, which have to deal with enterprise-level filters that can be customized and set up in countless number of ways. The absolute IPR metric won’t help as much as looking at how a B2B sender’s IPR trends over time.

Graymail
So why do so many legitimate emails get blocked from inboxes? The answer is graymail, which is “the ever-growing amount of newsletters, deals and updates that fill your inbox,” according to Microsoft. “Sometimes you love it, sometimes you hate it.”

Half of the typical consumer’s inbox is filled with newsletters and deals, while 17 percent is social updates, 9 percent is groups and other notifications, and 6 percent is shopping offers, according to Microsoft. The company also notes that 75 percent of email reported as spam is actually graymail. Here’s how Microsoft contrasts spam (only 3 percent of the typical inbox is truly spam) and graymail:

Reputation
In order to avoid being a victim of consumers’ increasingly cluttered inboxes, email marketers have to pay attention to four reputation metrics:

–