Permissioned Emails Not Reaching the Inbox

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Email marketing is helping to drive sales and attract new customers, however, problems remain in ensuring that requested emails successfully reach consumer inboxes. In the second half of 2009, 19.9 percent of commercial, permissioned emails never reached consumers’ inboxes in the United States and Canada, a slight improvement from January–June 2009 when 20.7 percent of commercial, permissioned emails failed to reach consumers’ inboxes, according to the new Email Deliverability Benchmark Report from Return Path. European inbox placement rates fared slightly better with 15 percent of requested, permissioned emails never reaching consumer inboxes.

Permissioned email reached only 80.1 percent of consumer inboxes in the United States and Canada during the second half of 2009 (July through December), a .8 percent increase from the 79.3 percent inbox placement rate recorded in the first half of 2009. In the United States and Canada, 3.5 percent of those emails were delivered to a “junk” or “bulk” email folder and 16.3 percent were missing or not delivered at all—with no hard bounce message or other notification of non-delivery. In Europe, 85.5 percent of emails reached consumers inboxes, 3.6 percent of emails were delivered to a “junk” or “bulk” folder, and 11 percent of emails were missing or not delivered at all. In the Asia Pacific region, inbox placement of permissioned emails was higher in the second half of 2009 with 86.9 percent of emails reaching the inbox. 10.7 percent of emails were missing or not delivered and 2.5 percent of emails were delivered to a “junk” or “bulk” folder.

According to the report, this is not only a consumer inbox issue, but also holds true for the business inbox. Senders have even more difficulty in reaching business addresses, which are typically protected by more vigilant email systems than consumer inboxes. During the second half of 2009, only 75.2 percent of emails reached business inboxes, but that’s a 3 percent improvement over the first half of 2009 when just 72.4 percent of emails reached business inboxes.

“The reason non-delivered rates vary is because each ISP has their own criteria for inbox placement. Therefore, senders must arm themselves with the right data to make smart decisions about their email campaigns in order to maximize revenue and minimize loss,” says Bilbrey. In 2010, senders must be vigilant about knowing their actual inbox placement rates vs. the traditional delivery metric that simply subtracts hard bounces from the number of emails deployed. Then, they need to take the next step and gain access to tools that will let them monitor those rates on a regular basis so they can proactively prevent delivery and rending failures in the future. The data and tools are readily available, even if they use an ESP or MTA provider; they just have to ask for it.”