One-Fifth of E-Mails Don’t Reach Inboxes

According to a recent report released by Return Path, titled “Return Path Deliverability Benchmark Report,” more than 20 percent of commercial, permissioned e-mails do not reach the inboxes of their intended recipients in North America.

These e-mails reached 79.3 percent of inboxes in the U.S. and Canada during the first six months of 2009, according to Return Path.

Of the 20.7 percent that do not reach their intended inboxes, 3.3 percent are sent to “junk” or “bulk” e-mail folders, while 17.4 percent are not delivered at all, “with no hard bounce message or other notification of non-delivery,” according to the company.

“In many cases, marketers are seeing "delivered" metrics that repeatedly show a 95% to 98% delivery rate,” said George Bilbrey, president and co-founder of Return Path in a statement. “Unfortunately, many ESPs and marketers have developed the belief that whatever emails aren’t bouncing have successfully reached the inbox. That’s just not true, as these numbers show. Marketers need to examine their current deliverability stats, and remember that hard bounces aren’t the only emails that aren’t reaching your subscribers.”

The U.S. had an 82 percent inbox placement rate, compared to 75 percent in Canada.

Return Path notes that the Direct Marketing Association projected that e-mail marketing will generate a return on investment of $43.52 in 2009, “twice the return earned by search and other marketing channels.”

The report notes, “What marketers may not realize is that their already good email performance could be even better if more of their emails were reaching consumers inboxes.”

Marketers trying to reach business e-mail addresses have even more difficulty reaching inboxes. These business-to-business e-mails have a deliverability rate of 72.4 percent in North America. Of the e-mails that are not delivered, 6.1 percent are sent to “junk” and “bulk” folders while 21.5 percent are not delivered at all.

In the U.S., Gmail inboxes were the toughest to reach, as messages sent to these e-mail addresses saw a 23 percent nondelivery rate during the first half of 2009, according to Return Path.

Hotmail and MSN had nondelivery rates of 20 percent each, while Comcast followed with 17 percent, AOL with 16 percent and Yahoo! with 15 percent.

Netzero and BellSouth each had failure rates of 14 percent, while Road Runner had a 12 percent nondelivery rate, USA.net had 11 percent and Cox had 8 percent.

Return Path utilized data from more than 500,000 e-mail campaigns conducted from January to June of this year. The company also studied data from 45 ISPs in the U.S. and Canada.

Sources:</strong

http://www.returnpath.net/blog/2009/07/more-than-20-of-commercial-per.php

http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007217