Email in 2025 isn’t fighting for attention; it’s fighting for survival. Not survival against TikTok or whatever shiny new platform your CMO is obsessing over, but survival against spam filters, dodgy sender reputations, and inbox algorithms that act more like gatekeepers than mail carriers.
Getting your email delivered isn’t the victory; getting it placed where subscribers are more likely to trust, see, and open it—that’s the real battle.
Although email deliverability feels like it’s out of one’s control, the truth is your inbox placement has a lot to do with your chances of landing in the inbox or spam folder.
Sure, deliverability is the sum total of many technical and design aspects, but a lot of it boils down to how well your emails maintain good engagement.
Here, we’ll demystify the essentials of inbox placement and give plenty of tips to attain high inbox placement rates so that your email deliverability improves.
What Is Inbox Placement in Email Marketing?
Inbox placement is the measure of whether the emails sent by senders are reaching the primary inbox, landing in the promotions tab, or getting filtered by the spam filter into the spam folder. Delivery alone doesn’t mean much if your messages are buried where subscribers never look.
Marketers are waking up to this. The Email Mavlers’ “Email Trends & Insights” infographic points to inbox placement and deliverability as 2025’s big focus.
Or as Carin Slater, Lifecycle Email Marketing Manager at Litmus, puts it: “When I think about email deliverability, I’m really thinking about whether my email reaches my subscribers.”
As a trustworthy email sender, what happens to an email after it’s successfully delivered is crucial for you. If the majority of your emails land in folders other than the primary inbox, people probably aren’t seeing your emails as often.
With poor inbox placement, you’ll also see low open rates, clicks, and conversion rates, and a poor sender reputation.
Reaching the primary inbox can also affect email contacts’ perception of your brand. Whether or not they’re satisfied with the customer experience you’re delivering relates to your sender reputation and impacts deliverability.
How Does Inbox Placement Affect Email Deliverability?
Inbox placement and deliverability are like a feedback loop. Deliverability gets your email to the recipient’s mailbox, and inbox placement decides whether it lands in the primary inbox, Promotions, or spam. But the bridge between the two is engagement.
Engagement is the currency that buys you inbox real estate. Opens, clicks, and responses tell Internet Service Providers your emails matter to your subscribers. Conversely, spikes in unsubscribes or a sudden drop in opens and clicks are early warning signs that deliverability is degrading.
Getting marked as spam is the fastest way to get exiled from the inbox. Yet fewer than one-third — 32% — of senders actively monitor spam complaint rates. That blind spot accelerates reputation decay: more complaints → worse reputation → poorer placement → fewer opens → even worse reputation.
Said another way: inbox placement and engagement are inseparable.
How to Improve Inbox Placement for Better Deliverability
a) How Do Email Authentication Protocols Improve Inbox Placement?
Mailbox providers need email senders to set up their authentication to protect their end users from spoofing and potentially malicious email content.
They check your ID. Authentication protocols (SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and increasingly BIMI) are that ID. They prove your emails are coming from you, not a scammer spoofing your domain.
Without them, providers have no reason to trust you—and untrusted senders often end up in spam. At a minimum, set up SPF and DKIM; DMARC aligns the two, while BIMI adds brand recognition in supported inboxes.
b) Why Is Email List Hygiene Critical?
Think of your email list like produce—fresh is valuable, stale is harmful. An email list full of invalid, inactive, or purchased email addresses is a threat to your inbox placement. Likewise, spam traps, hard bounces, and spam complaints negatively affect your sender reputation.
The solution is to grow your email list organically. Using double opt-in to confirm intent is also a good way to keep engaged contacts on the list.
Not to forget the email list hygiene. It regularly prunes unengaged subscribers from the list. Shrinking your email list might feel like a counterproductive move to building an email list. But, in the long run, a smaller, engaged audience will always help you lift up your engagement metrics than a giant, uninterested one.
c) How Does Engagement Help Keep Emails Out of Spam?
Inbox providers use engagement as their north star. As mentioned earlier, opens, clicks, forwards, and click-through to the website are indications that email recipients value the email you send.
Whereas, if unsubscribes or spam complaints are on the rise, it’s definitely a call to action for you.
To keep signals to mailbox providers positive:
- Personalize content
- Test subject lines,
- Send at a cadence your audience favours.
If subscribers quit engaging for long, set up a re-engagement email campaign. Still, if they show no intention of getting back with you, let them go off your database. A smaller but active list tells ISPs you’re a sender worth keeping in the inbox.
d) What Role Does Sender Reputation Play?
Sender reputation is your credit score with mailbox providers.
It’s calculated based on your sending history, including bounce rates, complaint rates, engagement, and consistency. A strong reputation unlocks inbox placement; a weak one slams the door shut.
The tricky part is that you don’t get a neat number in your inbox telling you how you’re doing.
Hence, a better alternative to monitor your sender reputation is to use tools such as Google Postmaster Tools, Microsoft SNDS, or third-party dashboards like Validity.
The rule to remember here is easy to follow: respect your subscribers’ preferences, send them personalized emails, and you’ll keep your emails out of spam folders. Ignore complaints, send to stale lists, or try shortcuts, and you’ll watch your sender reputation, inbox placement, and ultimately, deliverability suffer.
e) How Can You Avoid Spam Triggers in Email Content?
Even the cleanest list and best reputation can’t save an email riddled with spam triggers. ISPs are trained to flag certain email sending behaviour as sus. It’s a legitimate sender’s practice to avoid spam-triggering words in subject lines, too-good-to-be-true promises, link overload, or content that looks like a phishing attempt.
Email frequency is another factor that many marketers overlook as a silent killer of inbox placement. If you send too frequently, fatigue sets in, which can drive unsubscribes or spam complaints.
The antidote? Write like a human, not a spammer. Write clear subject lines. Adjust the email copy to subscriber expectations. And give value in each email, and subscribers will tolerate promotion on the side.
Over time, those choices protect your reputation and place your emails where visibility is the highest.
Wrapping Up
Poor inbox placement silently undermines your marketing and sales efforts. Understanding what affects your inbox placement performance is the first step toward improved deliverability and sustainable email success.
