And that distinction will cost you.
Most marketing teams are celebrating the wrong metric. They see “delivered” in their ESP dashboard and pop the champagne. Meanwhile, their emails are rotting in spam folders while competitors are actually getting read.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: your email service provider is lying to you.
Well, not lying exactly—but definitely not telling you the whole story. When your ESP reports a 98% delivery rate, all that means is the receiving server didn’t bounce your email back. That’s it. That’s the bar.
But where did those emails actually go? Into the inbox where people will see them? Into the spam folder where they’ll die unread? Quarantined by an overzealous filter? Buried in a promotional tab that might as well be a digital graveyard? Your ESP has no idea—and isn’t checking.
We see this blindspot destroy campaigns every single week. A SaaS company sends 50,000 emails. Their dashboard shows 49,000 “delivered.” They’re feeling great. Then they check their actual inbox placement and discover 30,000 went straight to spam. That’s not a campaign. That’s a waste of money and sender reputation.
This is exactly why we built manual inbox placement testing into EmailMonitoring.io. We don’t just trust what your ESP reports. We actually send test emails and check where they land across Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, and every major provider. Real inboxes. Real placement data. No guessing.
Because it doesn’t matter whether your email was “delivered” but whether it was seen. You can have a 100% delivery rate and a 0% open rate if everything’s hitting spam. The metrics your ESP gives you are just the starting point—not the finish line.
“Delivered” is not the same as “read.” And “read” is not the same as “in the inbox.” Stop celebrating technical delivery and start obsessing over actual placement. Your open rates and your revenue will thank you.
