Nearly one out of every eight permission-based commercial e-mails sent in the U.S. during the second half of last year went missing. That’s 13.0% to be precise, according to Return Path’s Global E-mail Deliverability Benchmark Report. We’re not talking about those that ended up in recipients’ junk or bulk e-mail folders—that’s an additional 4.6%.
To put it another way, only 82.4% of marketing e-mails made it to the inboxes of their intended recipients.
For business-to-business e-mailers, the figures are even more grim. Just three-quarters (75.2%) of their messages ended up in the intended inboxes, while 5.7% ended up in junk/bulk folders, and nearly one-fifth (19.1%) of the e-mails went missing.
Among individual Internet service providers (ISPs), BellSouth had the highest nondelivery rate, at 21.5%, followed by Gmail (20.7%). At the other end of the spectrum was Cox, with a nondelivery rate of just 5.5%.
So what should you be doing to minimize the number of your outbound e-mails that disappear into the ether? Entire reports can be written about how to improve deliverability (and in fact, have been written—see “It Matters What They Think: Reputation and Other Factors That Influence E-mail Deliverability”). At the very least, however, be sure you have these relatively simple measures in place:
- On your opt-in registration forms, have recipients enter their e-mail address twice, to increase your chances of having correct data from the get-go.
- “Send a welcome message to everyone who registers. Pull any bounced addresses off your list immediately,” Return Path suggests in its white paper “Your Reputation Holds the Key to Deliverability.”
- Authenticate your e-mail with a major protocol. The big three are Sender Policy Framework (SPF), Sender ID, and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM). ISPs are increasingly checking messages for this sort of authentication. Your IT team or e-mail service provider can help you obtain it.
- Subscribe to ISP feedback loops. As you no doubt know, the more complaints of spam that are logged against you, the dirtier your reputation in the eyes of the ISPs, and the more apt they are to not deliver messages from you. By requesting to receive feedback from the ISPs, you can see exactly who is accusing you of sending spam, so that you can immediately delete them from your list. You can also track whether a sizable percentage of complaints are coming from a specific data source, in which case Return Path advises that you stop mailing to all names from that source or reconfirm that they’ve opted in.
- Manage subscriber expectations. On your e-mail sign-up page, let potential recipients know how often they can expect e-mails and what sort of content the messages will include; if you can offer them options regarding frequency and content, so much the better. A recipient who expects to receive one message every other week only to receive one every day is a recipient who is more likely to complain of spam.
- Make it relatively easy for recipients to unsubscribe. You’d be surprised by how many people report e-mail as spam instead of unsubscribing simply because they can’t quickly figure out how to unsubscribe.
- While you’re at it, make it very easy for recipients to add your e-mail address to their address book. Provide instructions in your introductory e-mail as well as on the sign-up page.
- Adhere to ISP throttling limits. As bandwidth becomes more congested, more ISPs are implementing or tightening limits as to how much bandwidth a given party can use at any one time. For e-mail senders, this translates to how many messages can be sent within a given time frame.
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