Your email platform reports a strong delivery rate. Your campaign still made almost no money. Both can be true at once, because delivery and deliverability measure different things.
Your dashboard shows whether the receiving server accepted the message. It says nothing about where that message landed, or whether anyone saw it.
What your dashboard actually measures
Validity defines deliverability as a sender’s ability to reach the inbox rather than the spam folder. Delivery, often shown as the delivered rate in your email service provider dashboard, only tracks whether an email was accepted by the recipient’s mail server. Mail can still land in spam or be blocked at mailbox provider gateways. The delivered rate is a simple sent-minus-bounced calculation, so it never says where the mail went (Validity).
Senders know this matters. In Mailjet’s survey, 78.5% rated the importance of deliverability an 8 out of 10 or higher, but only 27% felt very confident in their knowledge of it, and 88% did not know what their email delivery rate was actually measuring (Mailjet).
What the numbers look like now
The average global inbox placement rate for 2025 was 87.2 percent, a 3.7 percent uplift year over year (Validity). That average hides a lot. Microsoft was the toughest mailbox provider at 75.6 percent inbox placement, and Europe was the best performing region at 89.1 percent (Validity).
Spam placement moved faster. Global spam placement almost doubled through 2024, from 4.5 percent in Q1 to 8.6 percent in Q4 (Validity). One in six legitimate, permission-based marketing emails never reaches the inbox (Validity).
The cost lands on revenue. In Kickbox’s 2025 Email Deliverability Survey, 64.6% of US businesses said inbox problems affected revenue or customer retention, and 60.3% named spam filtering as the biggest barrier to reaching consumers. Companies put 26.6% of marketing spend into email, while the average open rate across industries is 21.5% (eMarketer).
A decision table you can use on Monday
Ignore the delivery rate for a week. Track these three numbers instead (Validity).
| Metric | What it tells you | First move |
|---|---|---|
| Inbox placement rate | Emails delivered to the inbox out of total sent. Validity calls this the most accurate way to measure deliverability. | Send only to active and engaged subscribers, and verify new addresses at signup (Validity). |
| Spam placement rate | Emails landing in the spam folder out of total sent. | Pre-screen content for spam-like factors, then move your DMARC policy to quarantine or reject (Validity). |
| Missing rate | Mail that reached neither inbox nor spam, deferred or blocked by the mailbox provider. | Authenticate with SPF, DKIM and DMARC (Validity), then check blocklists for your sending domains and IPs (Mailgun). |
Then work in four steps.
- Measure placement, not delivery. Inbox placement testing is the best way to tackle the spam folder, and 48% of senders call staying out of spam a top challenge (Mailgun).
- Fix authentication before content. Over 90 percent of new DMARC adopters set the policy to None, which leaves spoofing wide open (Validity).
- Clean the list. 39% of senders rarely or never run list hygiene, and 53% do not monitor blocklists for their sending domains and IPs (Mailgun).
- Watch reputation weekly. 70% of senders are not monitoring their reputation with major mailbox providers such as Gmail (Mailjet).
Where this breaks down
Deliverability repair is slow and unglamorous. Sender reputation rebuilds over weeks, and no tool shortcuts that. Teams also skip the scorekeeping, so they never learn whether the effort paid off. 61.6% of businesses have not monitored revenue loss caused by poor deliverability (eMarketer). If your list is bought, or people never asked for your emails, cleaning will not save the campaign.
AI-written content can trip filters too (eMarketer). In our own sending work, Human+AI review of copy and segments catches most of that before a campaign goes out.
At Data Innovation we build and operate a deliverability stack that carries around 1B emails a month. A global FMCG client recovered EUR 5M after months of authentication, list surgery and reputation repair. We covered the mechanics in how poor deliverability takes a fifth of email revenue.
An open door
If your inbox placement rate sits well below your delivery rate, and you suspect that gap is costing you sales, we can help. Data Innovation is a Barcelona consultancy with more than 20 years in CRM and data, and a research fellowship at IESE. Tell us what your sending looks like and we will point to the leak. Get in touch.