Marketers: Repair Poor Reputations to Reach Inbox

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A new report re-confirms that email reputation significantly impacts a marketer’s ability to reach their intended audience. The results of the report, published by Return Path, encourages email marketers to examine the critical factors impacting email marketing performance in order to ensure their emails are getting into the inbox. While the report targets large email marketers, the findings can be applied to anyone who is responsible for their company’s emailing programs to customers and clients, regardless of size.

“If you have a million addresses and 20% of your emails are blocked, you are missing 200,000 messages every time you hit ‘send,’” reminds George Bilbrey, president of Return Path.  “This means lost revenue, poor customer experience, increased customer service costs, lost branding opportunities and the inability to advance your message to your marketplace.  By understanding the impact email reputation has on email programs, marketers can take immediate and corrective action to ensure higher inbox placement rates.”

Return Path says there are three critical factors that ISPs and other large-volume mail receivers use to determine whether or not to block emails:

• Reputation of a given email server, measured by complaints, spam trap hits, unknown user rates and similar metrics.

• Infrastructure set up which indicates a sender is a “real” mail server and not a botnet or spammer.

• Content associated with complaints, spam trap hits and unknown user rates.

To prepare the report, the researchers relied on complaint rates, spam trap hits and unknown user rates by Sender Score, the company’s proprietary reputation rank, which is calculated by aggregating reputation performance data from a variety of ISPs, spam filtering and security companies. For its reputation study, Return Path says analysts examined IPs by Sender Score bands on more than 18 million IP addresses, collected from 30 of the world’s top ISPs and other large-volume mail receivers representing over 2.1 billion mailboxes in North America, South America, Europe and Asia. The study shows how reputation factors influence an IP’s Sender Score and how that correlates to Inbox Placement Rates (IPR).

Report Findings
Return Path’s research shows that IPs with Sender Scores of between 41-50 have an IPR of 64% which means 36% of their email is blocked or diverted to a junk folder. IPs with Sender Scores in the mid-range between 51-70 already show considerably higher average IPRs with 71% (Sender Score 51-60) and 76% (Sender Score 61-70) respectively. Notably there is a decline in email that is rejected right at the gateway, however, the study shows IPs within this Sender Score band have a high number of emails that are rejected at a point beyond the gateway. Only IPs with the highest Sender Scores have email that is routinely “accepted” into an ISP’s system. The average IPR for IPs with Sender Scores of 91 or greater is about 88%. This is significantly lower than the 99% “accepted” rate that many Email Service Providers (ESPs) claim, Return Path points out, because in their view ESPs measure “delivered” and “accepted” at the ISP gateway, rather than what makes it to the inbox.

The Return Path research report, “The Sender Reputation Report: Key Factors that Impact Email Deliverability”  is available for download.