Why is my email inbox placement dropping but engagement is the same?
Michael Ko
Co-founder & CEO, Suped
Published 3 Jun 2025
Updated 19 Aug 2025
7 min read
It can be incredibly frustrating to see your email inbox placement decline, especially when your engagement rates seem to be holding steady. You check your open rates, your click-through rates, and they look fine, yet your emails are increasingly landing in the spam folder or promotions tab for a significant portion of your list. This disconnect can be puzzling for any email marketer.
The common assumption is that high engagement automatically guarantees excellent inbox placement. While engagement is a critical factor, it's not the only one. Mailbox providers, like Gmail and Yahoo, use sophisticated algorithms that consider a broader range of signals than just opens and clicks. If only a segment of your audience is engaging, it can still signal a problem.
This scenario indicates a subtle but significant shift in your sender reputation. While your most engaged subscribers are still receiving your messages in their primary inbox, unengaged or less engaged recipients, and especially those on spam trap lists, might be seeing your emails diverted. This can happen silently, without generating bounces or overt errors, making it particularly difficult to diagnose without the right insights.
The subtle shift in reputation
When inbox placement starts to drop without a corresponding dip in your core engagement metrics, it often points to a nuanced issue with your sender reputation. Mailbox providers assess your sending practices and recipient interactions comprehensively. If a significant portion of your list is inactive or ignoring your emails, even if your best subscribers are highly active, it can dilute your overall positive signals.
Internet service providers (ISPs) prioritize the user experience. If a sender consistently sends to addresses that rarely or never open, click, or reply, the ISP's algorithms interpret this as a lack of relevance or desirability for those recipients. As a result, even without direct spam complaints, these emails may be routed to less prominent folders like spam, junk, or promotional tabs. Your emails are still delivered to the mail server, but their placement changes.
Understanding the problem
Inactive segments: Emails sent to users who haven't engaged in a long time (e.g., 90+ days) can gradually degrade your sender's reputation.
Subtle reputation decline: Your overall domain and IP reputation might be taking small hits from these unengaged sends, even if your most active users continue to interact with your mail.
Probe accounts: Some of these unengaged addresses might be spam traps or monitoring accounts used by ISPs to gauge sending quality. Sending to them without engagement signals negative behavior.
The key is to understand that 'engagement' is measured by ISPs in a broader sense than just your internal metrics. It includes positive actions like opening, clicking, replying, and moving emails to the primary inbox, but also negative signals such as deleting without opening, moving to spam, and long periods of inactivity. A consistent level of engagement from your active subscribers doesn't necessarily offset the negative impact of sending to a large, unengaged segment.
Decoding deliverability signals
Mailbox providers are increasingly sophisticated in how they assess sender reputation and deliverability. They use a blend of factors beyond just explicit engagement from your active users. This is why you can see your core engagement metrics remain stable while inbox placement suffers for the broader audience.
Factors that might not directly impact your reported engagement rates, but significantly influence inbox placement, include overall list health, the presence of spam traps, and even how your domain is perceived across the entire email ecosystem. A decline in inbox placement often signals that a portion of your list is being shunted to the bulk folder, which can be a slow, persistent drain on your reputation, making it harder to fix over time.
Positive signals
Opens & Clicks: Direct interaction with your email content, indicating interest.
Replies: Especially for transactional or direct communication, this is a very strong positive signal.
Moves to primary inbox: Users manually moving your email from promotions or spam to their main inbox.
Adding to contacts: When recipients add your sending address to their contact list.
Negative signals
Deletes without opening: Indicates low interest or irrelevance before even viewing the content.
Spam complaints: Explicitly marking your email as spam, severely damaging reputation.
Long-term inactivity: Sending to addresses that have shown no engagement over many months.
The algorithms are designed to protect users from unwanted mail. If a large portion of your mailing list is consistently ignoring your messages, it signals to the ISP that your mail might not be genuinely wanted by everyone you're sending to. This can lead to a gradual, silent re-routing of your emails to less prominent folders for those non-engaged recipients, even as your active users keep your engagement metrics looking good.
Proactive strategies for maintaining placement
To address declining inbox placement while engagement appears stable, you need to be proactive about your list hygiene and sending practices. This isn't just about removing hard bounces, but identifying and managing subscribers who are no longer interacting with your emails.
One effective strategy is to aggressively prune or segment your unengaged users. If someone hasn't opened or clicked an email in 90 days or more, they are likely contributing to negative signals without adding to your positive engagement. Consider creating a dedicated re-engagement campaign for these segments, and if they still don't respond, remove them from your active sending list. This proactive approach helps to improve your overall sender reputation.
Action
Benefit
Segment your list by engagement
Isolate unengaged subscribers to avoid sending to them regularly, which can improve overall sender health.
Run re-engagement campaigns
Attempt to rekindle interest before removing subscribers, potentially bringing them back into active segments.
Remove inactive subscribers
Improve your sending metrics by reducing emails sent to disengaged users, thereby boosting overall deliverability.
Maintaining a clean and engaged list is foundational for long-term deliverability success. Even if your current engagement metrics are stable among your core audience, any widespread lack of interest can still lead to deliverability issues over time. Focus on quality over quantity for your mailing list.
The role of authentication and monitoring
Beyond list hygiene, strong email authentication is paramount. Sender Policy Framework (SPF), DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), and Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC) are fundamental. These protocols verify that your emails are legitimately sent from your domain, preventing spoofing and significantly boosting your credibility with mailbox providers. If these are misconfigured, it can severely impact your deliverability, regardless of engagement.
Monitoring your DMARC reports is crucial for understanding how mailbox providers are treating your emails. These reports provide valuable insights into authentication failures, sources of unauthorized mail, and overall deliverability trends. Regularly reviewing these reports can help you spot issues before they escalate into significant inbox placement problems.
Also, consider factors like your sending infrastructure. If you're using a shared IP, the sending practices of other users on that IP can affect your own deliverability. Consistent sending volume, good IP reputation, and avoiding sudden spikes in volume are all important. Regularly running an email deliverability test can help identify issues with your email content, links, and overall setup that might be triggering spam filters, even if your engaged recipients are still clicking through.
Restoring your inbox placement
A drop in inbox placement while engagement remains steady is a strong indicator that your overall sender reputation is suffering, even if your most active subscribers are still receiving your emails. This often means that unengaged recipients are being routed to spam or promotions folders, subtly hurting your standing with mailbox providers.
The solution lies in a multi-faceted approach focusing on aggressive list hygiene, consistent monitoring of your domain and IP reputation, robust email authentication, and continuous adjustment of your sending strategy based on broad deliverability data, not just engagement metrics from your active users. Remember, every email sent to a disengaged recipient, or one that triggers a negative signal, contributes to this issue.
By proactively managing your list, ensuring proper authentication, and paying close attention to deliverability trends, you can restore and maintain strong inbox placement for all your emails, ensuring your messages reach their intended destination.
Views from the trenches
Best practices
Actively segment your mailing list based on engagement levels and sending frequency.
Implement a strict policy for re-engagement campaigns for inactive subscribers.
Ensure all email authentication protocols, including SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, are correctly configured.
Monitor your DMARC reports regularly for insights into delivery and authentication issues.
Consistently send relevant content that encourages positive interactions like replies and adding to contacts.
Practice gradual IP warming for new sending IPs or domains.
Common pitfalls
Continuing to send emails to highly unengaged or inactive segments of your list.
Ignoring subtle drops in inbox placement if core engagement metrics appear stable.
Failing to regularly check for your domain or IP on email blacklists or blocklists.
Neglecting proper email authentication, which can lead to emails being marked as suspicious.
Sending inconsistent volumes of email, which can alert spam filters.
Not monitoring email bounce rates and other deliverability metrics diligently.
Expert tips
Use granular segmentation to tailor content for different engagement tiers to maximize positive interactions.
Consider a phased approach to re-engagement, gradually decreasing send frequency to inactive users.
Regularly review sender reputation metrics within Google Postmaster Tools and similar platforms.
A healthy unsubscribe rate, combined with low spam complaints, indicates you are managing your list well.
Prioritize email list cleaning and validation to remove invalid or risky addresses before sending.
Analyze your content for spam trigger words or formatting that might affect deliverability.
Marketer view
A marketer from Email Geeks says they observed a drastic drop in overall inbox placement rate at Gmail over a two-week period, despite no major impact on their engagement rate across multiple brands.
March 18, 2020 - Email Geeks
Expert view
An expert from Email Geeks explains that if inbox placement drops but engagement stays the same, it suggests a reputation decrease because mail to unengaged recipients and probe accounts is being moved to the bulk folder, while engaged recipients still receive mail in their inbox.
Gmail and 
Yahoo, use sophisticated algorithms that consider a broader range of signals than just opens and clicks. If only a segment of your audience is engaging, it can still signal a problem.
