Placement Testing for Deliverability Monitoring

Placement testing isn't a one-time check you run before a campaign. For teams sending at scale, it's a continuous monitoring process—a feedback loop for your entire outbound infrastructure.

Without it, you're flying blind. You burn through domains, waste money on leads that never see your message, and can't diagnose why your reply rates suddenly dropped to zero.

When you manage dozens of domains sending thousands of emails daily, you can't rely on open rates to measure success. The real problems are invisible until it's too late.

1. No Visibility into Inbox Placement: Your open rates look okay, but reply rates are dead. You have no data to confirm if you're landing in the primary inbox, promotions, or the spam folder across Google and Microsoft inboxes.
2. Inability to Diagnose Root Causes: When deliverability tanks, you're left guessing. Was it the new batch of domains? The aggressive new subject line? A sudden volume spike? Without testing, you can't isolate the variable and fix the actual problem.
3. Reactive Damage Control: You only discover a domain is burned after a campaign has already failed for two weeks, wasting time and leads. You need an early warning system to catch reputation decay before it torpedoes your pipeline.

For a Deliverability Lead or RevOps leader, an effective placement testing system provides confidence and control over the outbound function. The ideal state isn't about hitting 100% inboxing; it's about having a predictable, measurable system.

1. A clear dashboard showing inbox placement rates across providers (Google Workspace, Outlook 365).
2. The ability to run A/B tests on copy and instantly see its impact on spam placement.
3. Automated alerts when a specific domain's placement rate drops below a set threshold (e.g., 85%).
4. Confidence to scale sending because you have a real-time feedback loop on your infrastructure's health.

Setting up a deliverability monitoring system is an infrastructure project, not a campaign tactic. It requires a systematic approach.

1. Build a Controlled Seed List: Acquire and fully warm up a diverse set of inboxes that you control (e.g., 10 Google Workspace, 10 Microsoft 365, a few personal Gmail/Outlook). These are your canaries in the coal mine; they exist only to receive your test emails.
2. Establish a Baseline: Before testing new variables, send your standard, best-performing campaign to the seed list. Analyze where the emails land. This is your benchmark for what 'good' looks like.
3. Integrate Pre-Flight Checks: Make placement testing a mandatory step in your campaign launch checklist. Before any new sequence goes live to a real list, send it to your seed list first. If it doesn't pass, it doesn't launch.
4. Monitor and Isolate Variables: Run tests on your active campaigns weekly. If placement rates drop, change only one variable at a time (e.g., test a new subject line, then test a new domain, then test a different call-to-action) to find the root cause.

Manually managing a seed list and testing workflow is feasible for one person sending 1,000 emails a month. It breaks completely when you have a team managing 50+ domains sending 100k+ emails. This is where an infrastructure platform becomes non-negotiable.

Look for core functionality that handles:

1. Automated Seed List Management: The platform should manage and rotate its own global seed list, so you get accurate placement data without having to maintain dozens of your own inboxes.
2. Integrated Testing: The ability to run a placement test directly from the sequencing interface, rather than exporting copy to a separate, disconnected tool.
3. Historical Reporting: Tracking placement scores over time for each of your sending domains, so you can see trends and diagnose reputation decay before it becomes critical.

SuperSend is designed as this execution and infrastructure layer for outbound teams sending at volume. It integrates placement testing directly into the sending workflow, providing the visibility needed to scale safely. Before trying to implement this manually, it's critical to understand the core infrastructure strategies that support deliverability at scale.