Meet the New Slop, Same as the Old Slop

About 20% of permission-based e-mails on average are treated by Internet service providers as spam, according to a new report by deliverability concerns Pivotal Veracity and Goodmail.

Sound familiar? Well, it should. The number hasn’t significantly changed in years.

Deliverability consultancy Return Path published a study in 2006 saying e-mail non-delivery rates for its clients were 19.2% in the first half of that year, 15% in 2002 and 22% in 2004.

According to this most recent report by Pivotal Veracity and Goodmail, 5% of e-mail messages in a study of Pivotal Veracity’s eDelivery Tracker clients’ programs ended up in spam folders and 15% of the messages went unaccounted for, meaning they were probably blocked.

What is more, these studies are probably painting a rosier picture of average e-mail deliverability than is probably the case among e-mail marketers overall because the marketers studied obviously care enough about deliverability to have hired firms to help them boost it.

“These likely represent your better case scenarios because the statistics are derived from marketers who care enough about deliverability to at least track it,” said Pivotal Veracity CEO Deirdre Baird. “It is highly likely the average marketer has far greater deliverability issues and is simply none the wiser because they have no visibility into the problem and no means to identify it.”

And while it’s tempting to interpret these studies to mean that ISPs have been consistently bad at distinguishing permission-based e-mail from spam, Baird contends the most likely reason deliverability rates have remained unchanged for so long is that most marketers have failed to improve their e-mail marketing practices.

“In many cases to improve deliverability, you need to change the way you do business, something many marketers are not willing or able to do,” she said, adding that the problem often lies with senior management. “I think e-mail executives have a very hard time convincing senior executives, ‘we shouldn’t be mailing our customers four times a month just because we can and it’s cheap.’”

Moreover, she said, too many marketers look to place the blame for deliverability troubles anywhere but where blame should be placed—on themselves.

For example, she said, marketers sometimes blame their e-mail service providers for delivery troubles caused by their own bad marketing practices and switch vendors.

“If you go from one ESP to another and continue your same mailing practices, you’re going to have the same deliverability issues. If you mail from one or the other it’s not going to matter,” she said. “What matters is what you’re mailing and to whom.”

The top three gauges ISPs use to determine an e-mailer’s reputation—or whether its e-mail should be treated as spam—are the number of nonexistent addresses, or unknown users, a mailer attempts to reach, the number of spam traps the mailer hits and the number of spam complaints the mailer generates from recipients. Marketers can control all of these metrics by exercising list hygiene and mailing restraint.

“You can’t buy a reputation,” said Baird. “Your e-mail reputation is your mailing practices, which has everything to do with how you acquire names and how you mail them. Maintaining a good e-mail reputation is like losing weight. There isn’t a magic pill. Stop eating cake.”

Moreover, she said, having a top ESP isn’t a substitute for e-mail best practices.

“All the top-tier ESPs at this point have the infrastructure in place to manage bounces, remove spam complaints, throttle mail and properly apply authentication,” she said. “Your ESP can only make so many calls to Yahoo to unblock you. On the third call, Yahoo’s going to refuse to lift the block because they know the marketer’s not changing its business practices.”

But given that the trade press has been covering this issue for years and the numbers haven’t budged, it’s probably unrealistic to think much will change anytime soon.

“We’re saying the same things we did five years ago,” said Baird. “Not a whole lot has changed.”