Blue Utopia Blog
Is your Email Being Seen?
Wed, May 22, 2019 - 04:13 PM
Political emails are already starting to arrive like mosquitoes at a picnic. And one of the things we noticed here was that more than we expected were winding up in Spam and in Gmail's Promotions tab. We wrote about Gmail's Promotions tab here. We decided to perform a simple test to see which campaigns were successfully getting their emails delivered. It was a very simple and straightforward test. Here’s what we did:
- First, we created a brand new Gmail account. We wanted an email that had no unique history of interacting with received emails and with no contacts.
- We performed this test only on Gmail, no other ESPs. That's mostly because we wanted to keep it simple (to a single account) and because more people are using Gmail than pretty much anything else.
- Then we joined the email list for 14 campaigns -- mostly Presidential and a few from the hotly contested US Senate race in CO, and then a couple of our own client lists.
- Then we waited for the emails to come in and after 5 days of receiving emails to the new account, here are the results. Test Results by Sender
Sample Sender Inbox Promotions Tab Spam Folder Platform Used Dan Baer 0 2 0 BSD Joe Biden 0 1 0 BSD BlueUtopia 1 0 0 BlueUtopia Cory Booker 0 3 1 BSD Pete Buttigieg 1 0 2 NGP DLCC 0 11 2 BSD Kamala Harris 0 2 0 ActionKit Jay Inslee 0 1 2 ActionKit Alice Madden 0 2 0 BSD Andrew Romanoff 0 1 0 BSD Bernie Sanders 0 5 0 ActionKit Andru Volinsky 1 0 0 BlueUtopia Elizabeth Warren 0 8 0 BSD Trish Zornio 0 2 0 NGP
Breakdown by Email Routing
The Spam Folder
Of the 49 emails received in the 5-day test, 7 (15%) were routed to the spam folder by Gmail.
The Promotions Tab
Of those 49 emails, 38 (79%) were routed to the Promotions tab.
The Inbox
And, finally, of those 49 emails, 3 (6%) were routed to the inbox.
Breakdown by Email Vendor-
ActionKitInbox: 0Promotion: 8Spam: 2 -
BSDInbox: 0Promotion: 29Spam: 2 -
BlueUtopiaInbox: 2Promotion: 0Spam: 0 -
NGPInbox 1:Promotion: 2Spam: 2
More caveats
This is a very limited test - by design. It was meant to be a simple test, using only Gmail, over 5 days only, and using fairly large senders of email. Any test of this limited scope and sample can have skewed outcomes.
BlueUtopia's clients tend to be smaller and send smaller volumes of email than a presidential campaign. It's easier to arrive in the inbox when delivering a few tens of thousands as opposed to a few million.
We required a minimum of two emails in the 5-day period to summarize a vendor. The test account only received a single email sent by ESP, ActionNetwork (Ed Perlmutter). It was assigned to Promotion tab but because it was the only one, they were not included in the vendor summary.
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