Why You Need to be Doing Your Own Email Delivery Monitoring

Are you doing email delivery monitoring? We sure hope so, because inbox delivery monitoring is one of two critical ways to keep your finger on the pulse of your email campaigns (the other is tracking your email open rates and click-through rates, which is another discussion for another day).

If sending bulk email (email marketing, email campaigns, newsletters, etc.) is or is at least part of the lifeblood of your company, than tracking whether the email is getting into the inbox, or if it’s instead going into the junk folder or being blocked entirely, is how you know whether that lifeblood is getting to all the extremities, and actually delivering oxygen to them (to really stretch a metaphor). And to stretch it to its utmost extent: the lack of good inbox delivery can lead to email gangrene.

So, how does one do inbox delivery monitoring? Well, you either do it for yourself, or you pay someone to do it.

Now, we should say right up front that our Get to the Inbox by SuretyMail email sender certification services do not include inbox delivery monitoring. And that’s because SuretyMail does one thing and one thing only, (and we must say that we do it very well, in fact we would say that we do it the best) and that is getting the email that you send into the inbox. That is what people pay us to do, and also why they pay us so much less than other services charge. By focusing on our one mission of getting your email delivered to the inbox we are able to run lean and light, and pass that savings on to you.

But there’s another reason that we don’t do email delivery monitoring: because for the most part it’s a rip-off (we said “for the most part”, stay with us here…). When we say that it’s a rip-off, we don’t mean that companies out there are scamming you when they charge for inbox delivery monitoring. What we mean, and listen closely, is this:

Anybody can set up a bunch of free email accounts, such as at Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, etc., have you add them to your mailing lists, and then charge you a bundle to check the inbox and see if your mail is there.

Literally anybody.

And we could do it for you, but then we’d have to charge you more. And why would you pay someone to do that for you when you can do it yourself so easily for free? In fact you should be doing that even if you are using an inbox monitoring service, because otherwise how will you know what is really going on with your email? We often get businesses coming to us who are being told by their expensive delivery monitoring service that they have issues getting to the inbox at this inbox provider or that mailbox provider, and when we check it for them it turns out that they aren’t having issues at all. In other instances they are having issues but it’s an easy fix, which their service never provided to them.

But maybe you really don’t have the time or staff to do this for yourself. Or maybe you actually want more information than “did my email make it into the inbox?” such as, if it didn’t make it to the inbox, why didn’t it make it to the inbox? Is it because your IP address or URL is blacklisted somewhere? (And, you should want this information, because it’s available and it’s critical information.) While you can do all that for yourself, for free, sometime’s free is too expensive in terms of time, manpower, etc.. If that’s the case, here are a couple of inbox delivery monitoring services that are known in the industry as being good guys:

GlockApps
KickBox