5 things a 25-year deliverability expert said that are worth knowing about inbox placement

The DTC beauty category is crowded. To break through, Jennifer Aniston’s brand LolaVie, worked with Roku Ads Manager to easily set up, test, and optimize CTV ad creatives. The campaign helped drive a big lift in sales and customer growth, helping LolaVie break through in the crowded beauty category.

Learn more

Hey, it’s Pavel

Last week I was watching a Stripo webinar with Laura Atkins and she walked through the fundamentals of inbox placement, You may already knew most of what she was going to say. But there's something about hearing it said clearly, by someone who's been inside this for 25 years, that makes the things you already know feel real in a different way.

Watch the full webinar here: Stripo x Laura Atkins — Inbox Placement

Apple Mail Pre-fetches images. Gmail builds the email before the user even opens it. Most ESPs flag these as "bot opens" and tell you to remove them from your stats.

The email only gets built when a real user logs into an active mailbox. Which means if you're getting opens, the mail made it to the inbox. The open fired because the mail landed somewhere a real person was looking.

So a drop in your open rate even a 10% drop isn't an engagement problem. It's a delivery problem. Your mail is going to spam and you haven't noticed yet.

A lot of senders treat reputation like a score that sits somewhere and waits to be checked. It doesn't work like that.

Your reputation changes with every single send. And it's not just what you're sending Google is also factoring in your domain's web presence, your SEO signals, and anywhere your domain shows up in affiliate mail. If affiliates are using your domain in spammy sends, that touches your reputation in ways you can't see.

Worth knowing: Google is removing the reputation display from Postmaster Tools v2. Not replacing it with anything. They've said it wasn't capturing the full picture anyway.

Senders do this thinking they're starting clean. Sometimes it helps, sometimes it doesn't.

If you keep the same content, the same format, the same brand voice, Google can connect the dots. Same message, different envelope. Also: if you have multiple domains inside a single Google Workspace account, Google already knows they belong to the same organization. You told them yourself.

The Promotions tab has been around since 2013. Over a decade in, and nobody has cracked how to consistently land in Primary.

In January, Gmail broke its own tab filtering and everything went to Primary for a while. One company ran an analysis and found their unsubscribes spiked. Promotional emails in Primary made people feel interrupted so they left.

When users go into the Promotions tab, they're in a shopping mindset. That's actually where you want to be if you're running marketing email. Accept it and make your Promotions tab experience count.

The logo in the inbox looks nice. But BIMI does not improve where your mail lands. It is a display signal, full stop.

What it does do: the process of getting BIMI forces you to lock down your full DMARC setup not just for marketing mail, but across your whole domain. That cleanup can improve your reputation. But it's the cleanup doing the work, not the checkmark.

If you're a smaller sender, the cost (a few thousand a year, plus implementation) probably isn't worth it unless you have a specific reason.

The through line across all of this is the same one it always is: send mail people want, keep your authentication clean, and watch your engagement by mailbox provider not in aggregate.

Nothing in deliverability has changed. The filters are just getting better at finding out who's been skipping steps.

I've been reading Laura Atkins' Word to the Wise blog for about 8 years. She's one of the people I've learned a lot from in this industry.

Before You Go: Here's How I Can Help

Until next time,

Pavel