Email Seed List Testing: Get the Best Results with GlockApps

What Is a Seed List in Email Marketing?

Briefly, a seed list definition is a series of email addresses that you send a letter to before sending it out to your target audience, which allows you to test your message in different conditions. This way you can see how your email will look and interact with different services and providers before you actually send it out.

Initially, companies created mailing lists using the personal email addresses of employees. Later, they started using special test accounts for email marketing. Nowadays, businesses prefer practicality and cost-effectiveness by using special spam testing solutions that have their own built-in seed lists.

So, let’s take a look at what you need to know about seed testing and why this practice is important for your digital marketing strategy to grow and stay one step ahead.

What Is Seed Testing?

In short, seed testing is inbox placement checking, which analyzes your emails to make sure they get to the main folder and don’t end up in spam before you send them to your real subscribers. Based on its results, you’ll know what to do next and what issues to fix first. After that, you can work on optimizing your emails to improve their performance and resolve many technical issues such as email bounces, spam rate, blocklisting, and authentication problems.

You also have the option of fixing user experience issues such as broken links, improper text, image alignment, poor readability, and response speed. By addressing these things, you know in advance that you’ve done the right thing – at least from the perspective of spam filters!

What Are the Benefits of Seed Emails?

The main advantage of a seed list in email marketing is that you can fix any technical, visual, or engagement issues with your message or newsletter at the revision stage.  You wouldn’t want to send a poorly designed email to potential and current users because it might not display images or contain broken links. After several unsuccessful emails, people will simply delete or not even open all subsequent emails, or, which is the biggest fear of email marketers, unsubscribe.

So, keep your time and resources, and run preliminary tests to stay in touch with your customers. GlockApps is happy to help you do so with our progressive solutions.

Types of Seed List Deliverability Tests

Since our mission is to make your delivery perfect, we are actively developing and improving in this field, providing you with the most detailed and convenient seedlist testing. Discover Inbox Insight, a powerful tool designed to offer clarity amidst the uncertainty of email placement. So let’s take a look at the types of tests that will be useful for your effective marketing workflow:

1. Manual Test.

Deliverability is an ongoing concern for all email professionals. Our checker will rate your email on a scale from 1 to 100 and give you an understanding of where exactly it lands in the recipient’s mailbox: main Inbox, Promotions tab, or Spam folder.

But Inbox Insight is more than just a diagnostic tool, it’s a proactive partner in your email marketing success. Regardless of the ESP you choose, it enables you to run a thorough seed list check to identify and fix delivery issues before your campaigns even go live.

A manual test can usually be recommended for one-time campaigns, for example, if you’ve launched a promotion, want to share some updates, or maybe you’re releasing a new collection, where an email campaign would be the perfect way to notify customers. Always test each of your new email campaigns to make sure it performs well.

To conduct this test log in to your GlockApps account, access Inbox Insight and go to Start Manual Test.

Create a Manual Test in 8 simple steps:

1. Choose Spam Filters.
2. Select Email Service Providers.
3. Specify the folder to save your test and report to.
4. Optionally, add notes to the test.
5. Configure the Link Checker.
6. Copy and paste the ID string into the content.
7. Segment the seed list and send your email:
   – Break the seed list into several parts to avoid overloading a single spam test
   – Use To:, Cc:, and Bcc: fields wisely: Include up to 20 emails in the To: field, and divide the rest into the Cc: and Bcc: fields.
8. Click View Report.

Now understand your Deliverability Report:

• Get instant access to your results with in-depth analysis in three tabs: Deliverability, Content Analysis, and Action Steps.
• Also check your Email Placement Results, IP Analytics (Sender IP Reputation and Blocklists for the whole chain of IPs used in the checking process), Domain Analytics, Sender Authentication, and Spam Filter evaluations.
• View Email Providers Delivery Report with specific statistics per each ESP and access to Header or IP details options for troubleshooting.

We’ve already created a comprehensive tutorial with a detailed video to help you test your email campaigns before sanding with ease.

2. Automatic Test.

Also, with GlockApps Inbox Insight, you can create automated tests and monitor your inbox on a daily basis without any further action from you. Once you have completed the first setup, our tool will send your emails to the seed list test addresses at the time interval you choose. We check your emails for deliverability every day, and if they end up in spam, we send you an alert so you can quickly resolve the issue before it impacts the customer experience.

The deliverability report is available in your dashboard, where it will show you in detail which folder your email lands in. You will receive notifications if your email does not reach the inbox of any of the selected mailbox providers.

Monitor the deliverability of different messages or sending accounts in parallel. And what’s more, you can fully customize the notifications and the percentage of inbox messages or spam that is critical to you, and set up alerts for your most important email service providers.

For which purposes will automated tests be most effective? Definitely for triggered emails, such as transactional messages, subscription confirmations, account activations, purchase approvals, verifications, welcome emails, and onboarding letters, the content of which does not change. This means that you can set up testing for the same messages once and receive further analytics without any action on your part.

Automatic tests are also perfect for cold email lead-generation campaigns. You can conveniently analyze and improve more than 2000 sending domains or mailboxes performance and timely receive instant warnings to swiftly switch your mailboxes.

To set up an Automatic Test, do the following:

• Go to Inbox Insight and create a Sending Account, where enter your sender information and the SMTP server information.
• Then choose Start Spam Test – Automatic Test and Add new email.
• Select the throttling option by clicking the Change Throttling button to set the time when the message will be sent to the selected email providers.
• Select the spam filters and seed email providers.
• Add notes to the test if needed.
• Activate or deactivate the Link Checker.
• Set the proper test time.
• Customize result notifications to your needs.
• Choose the Just Save or Save and Test Now option.

Next, to view the ready report just click the email Subject line in the Automatic tests section, where by default the system displays your latest report.

It is important to understand that each of your outreach mailboxes has a different reputation, which depends on its activity, engagement, and bounce rate. And when managing multiple mailboxes, it’s crucial to spot the first signs of deliverability and reputation issues in time.

If your outreach rate drops within 30 days, it means you need to start troubleshooting. Follow the recommendations in the “Action Steps” tab and reduce the number of emails sent from your mailbox until the situation improves.

Our Inbox Insight tool saves you time with seed list testing automation and provides useful insights for each mailbox. It is enough to check the dashboard just a few times a week, which is quite easy and time-saving, so you can focus on more strategic tasks.

Check out the full tutorial here and follow the step-by-step instructions to set up your test.

3. Proxy Test.

We also recommend using the GlockApps unique proxy testing feature, dedicated to optimizing and simplifying the process of testing your delivery and resolving any issues promptly.

A Proxy Test has all the advantages of a Manual test but has the added benefit of using an intermediate email address that gets your messages during the test. Its peculiarity lies in the ability to send emails to a predefined seeding list that includes various email providers and spam filters after they are received by a proxy address.

This checking allows you to closely track factors such as inbox placement, spam rate, sender score, delivery time, and content analysis results, helping you to optimize email marketing campaigns and improve deliverability and engagement with ease.

To launch the Proxy Test, follow these steps:

• Go to Sending Accounts within the Inbox Insight dashboard.
• Create your Sending Account.
• Enter SMTP server settings.
• Select a folder to save the test.
• Enable or Disable the Link Checker.
• Set the option for Message Headers (keep or customize them).
• Select Mailbox Providers according to your preferences.
• Choose the Check & Create button to finish.
• Now just copy a proxy email address and send your email to it.

View the accurate results of the finished test in the folder of your choice. See the more detailed step-by-step article here.

After setting up all the parameters once, you can use this proxy address permanently, regenerating it only if you need it. Simplify your workflow and save valuable time with our easy-to-use seed testing tool.

Closing Thoughts

Seed list testing allows you to check your email in an unbiased environment before you send it out to your subscribers. Your customers are using different ISPs, browsers, and devices, so email pre-testing is a must nowadays, giving you comprehensive data to determine what exactly causes deliverability issues.

Overall, checking through the seed list in email marketing allows you to improve every single point of your campaign, so choose the type of Inbox Insight test that suits your business’s specific needs and improve your results with each new letter you send.