Most marketers reportedly think that from around 95% to 98% of their e-mail is getting delivered.
And most marketers would be wrong.
An average of 20% of permission-based e-mail fails to make it to recipients’ inboxes, according to a just-released study from e-mail deliverability firm Return Path.
As many readers will no doubt note, this number isn’t new.
Deliverability concern Pivotal Veracity published a similar study last month.
Return Path has also published similar findings over the years.
But even with studies published year after year showing one in five e-mails never make it into recipients’ inbox, many marketers wrongly consider non-delivery something that happens to others, according to George Bilbrey, president of Return Path.
“Most e-mail marketers are aware that some legitimate e-mail gets blocked from inboxes. They just generally think it’s the e-mail of other companies,” said Bilbrey. “When we dive into the data across our client base we find about 20% of e-mail isn’t delivered. And we work with top-tier, brand-name marketers.”
The reason most marketers think undelivered e-mail is a problem for others is that they take false comfort in a misunderstood metric, according to Bilbrey.
“A big reason why many marketers think deliverability failures don’t happen to them is because their metrics report confirms that 98% of their e-mail is ‘delivered,’” Bilbrey said. “But this number is calculated by most systems as the number of e-mails sent, minus the number that bounce.”
But just because an e-mail didn’t bounce doesn’t necessarily mean it was delivered.
“ISPs deliver mail to junk mail folders and they accept mail and drop it on the floor,” said Bilbrey.
The way most ESPs report on delivered e-mail, the messages sent into junk folders and the messages “dropped on the floor” are counted among those ‘delivered,’ even though they failed to make it into recipients’ inboxes.
“It’s not that ESPs aren’t telling the truth, it’s that they’re telling the story with the data that’s available to them,” said Bilbrey.
Another problem is there is no industry consensus on what “delivered” means.
In a study conducted in 2007, the then-independent Email Experience Council—now part of the Direct Marketing Association—found that 79% of e-mail service providers surveyed defined "delivered" by deducting all failures from total mailed, while 21% calculated it by deducting hard bounces—where the address no longer exists or mail is being blocked for some reason—from total mailed.
As a result, the same marketer doing business with multiple e-mail service providers could get widely differing reports on their “delivered” metrics. What is more, it is impossible to get an accurate reading on other metrics, such as click or conversion rates, if the marketer doesn’t know exactly how the delivered rate is calculated.
“The delivered rate is a misnomer,” said Bilbrey. “It should be called the didn’t-bounce rate or the accepted rate or something along those lines.”
Also, clients sometimes switch or consider switching e-mail service providers because the marketer has been led to believe one e-mail service provider has a better deliverability track record than another when the one with the seemingly better rate is really just measuring it differently.
Given that an industry consensus on the definition of “delivered” is not likely to come about anytime soon, it is important for marketers to find out how their e-mail service providers define the term so they can begin to accurately assess the other metrics in their programs.
“You need to know what your inbox placement rate is,” said Bilbrey. “That determines your economics, not whether or not the gateway servers says ‘yes, we got your mail,’ because a lot happens after that.”
