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Not All Inboxes Are The Same!

Not All Inboxes Are The Same!

Monitoring engagement by domain group.

Chris Miquel
July 29, 2024

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Not All Inbox Providers Are The Same!

As email marketers and newsletter operators, we tend to think that our overall email campaign stats are what we need to focus on.

What was our open rate?
How about our click-through rate?
Is our spam complaints under 0.1%?
Did you see how many bounces we had?

Though all these metrics are important and need to be monitored, bad things can sneak up on you before you’re ever expecting it if you aren't looking a layer deeper.

You need to keep track of how your emails are delivering and engaging on each of the major ISPs…

…Because each ISP manages its own inboxes

Before we get into how it can be done, let me break down the major ISP groups for you. The groups below should be monitored individually to ensure the best delivery overall for your entire list.

Others

Includes a whole mess of cable and internet providers as well as other general internet domains like business email accounts.

It is extremely important that you can identify if a domain group is having deliverability issues so you can adjust your sending segment to improve that groups engagement metrics.

How to monitor engagement by domain group

It’s important that you have the ability to view a snapshot of how your email campaigns look by each individual ISP.

Some ESPs make this easy for you as they break down their campaign stats by individual ISPs, as shown below.

Some will group domains into groups like Yahoo/AOL which includes 8 different domains which were listed previously in this newsletter.

Now for the ESPs that don’t provide this additional layer of visibility by domain, you can still keep an eye on it by creating segments for each domain group.

For instance, this newsletter is hosted on Beehiiv, so to get transparency on how each domain is delivering I create segments based on each domain group.

For the Yahoo/AOL domains group, I set up the segments to include all of the domains linked to that group as below.

I then create segments for each of the metrics I want to monitor including Sent, Opens, Clicks, and Unsubs.

It’s not perfect, as you still have to calculate percentages for the different engagement metrics.

But, when you see an issue in the overall sending metrics of a campaign you have these segments set up to help identify if a specific domain group is to blame.

In the example above we could clearly see that our open rates were way below our standard open rates of 35 - 45%.

So if we looked into the campaign by domain group we could see if it was an overall issue or if a particular domain group was to blame.

Since we identified the issue was based on a single domain group, we could modify our sending segment to improve the engagement metrics for that domain group, in turn improving the chances of those emails getting into the inbox.

Tightening up your sending segment

When you identify an issue with your deliverability there are two ways to attack it. Both include tightening up your base sending segment.

At this point, I hope you are already using a base sending segment to ensure the best delivery possible to your email list.

If you don’t know what a base sending segment is, I broke it down in a previous newsletter you can read here.

Tighten up your base sending segment

The quickest and easiest strategy to implement when your delivery is down, is to tighten up your base sending segment across all domain groups.

What do I mean by tightening up?

Assume your base sending segment is a 60/30/10.

We would create a new sending segment called Tightened Sending Segment which would be 30/15/5.

Which includes anyone who has:

Clicked in the Last 30 Days.
Opened in the Last 15 Days.
Added in the Last 5 Days.

This tightened segment is requiring engagement in half the time period as our base sending segment, in essence tightening up the engagement window.

When we tighten the engagement window we are sending mostly to more people who have recently engaged which should improve engagement metrics on the next campaigns which help show the ISPs our subscribers want the emails from us.

If things are really bad you may have to tighten even more.

We’ve had to tighten lists up to 15/7/2 to get the domain reputation back from newsletters that weren’t following best-sending practices including not having a base sending segment.

Now if you can create more complex segments you can tighten up your sending segment by domain group.

Advanced segments by domain group

DISCLAIMER: This strategy should only be implemented if you are an expert at creating advanced segments and analyzing the performance of domain groups.

If you identified you're having delivery issues with a specific domain group, then ideally it would be best to tighten up your sending segment for that domain group only and allow the other domain groups to receive emails based on your base engagement window.

To implement this strategy you would create a sending segment for each domain group.

Sending Segment - Gmail
Sending Segment - Yahoo/AOL
Sending Segment - Comcast
Sending Segment - Microsoft
Sending Segment - Other

You would select each of these segments to send to when scheduling your emails.

You would then have the ability to tighten up your sending segment by each specific domain group instead of blanketing your tightening across the entire list.

For example, Comcast and Microsoft are both known to randomly block huge chunks of emails from being delivered for no reason at all.

There would be no reason for you to tighten up your Gmail or Yahoo/AOL in that case, which is most likely the largest percentage of your list to begin with.

Now for a quick message from this week’s sponsor

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So what exactly does beehiiv offer?

World-class growth tools like the referral program and recommendation network
Monetization via the beehiiv Ad Network and premium subscriptions (i.e. beehiiv helps you get paid)
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It’s an art, not a science

Just remember…

Email deliverability is more of an art than a science.

There are no exact metrics or rules to guarantee your emails will always hit the inbox.

You need to be flexible with how you are managing your sending segments and continue to monitor your engagement when making adjustments.

Sometimes we need to take a step back (tighten up) to take two steps forward.

Let’s tighten up,
Chris Miquel

Follow me on Twitter: @miqchris

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