Email Delivery Rate Just 79.3 Percent in North America
By Anna Johnson on August 12th, 2009Research by Return Path reveals that ‘hard bounces’ (where emails are returned because the recipient’s email address does not exist) are not the only – and probably not the primary – reason for non-delivery of email. Indeed, Research Path has found that ISP and corporate filtering systems are responsible for most emails not being delivered.
Return Path found that 79.3 percent of permission email messages made it to inboxes in North America in the first half of 2009. While 3.3 percent of messages ended up in bulk or spam folders, the remaining 17.4 percent just went missing.
In the United States alone, the inbox placement rate was slightly higher, at 82 percent. Meanwhile, only 72.4 percent of business-to-business (B2B) emails were delivered to inboxes.
Successful delivery rates also varied by ISP. In the U.S., Gmail had a 23 percent failure rate, with Hotmail and MSN close behind, at 20 percent each.
eMarketer suggests that such high failure rates may not have drawn much response from Internet marketers because of high email ROIs masking the problem.
Short of somehow enticing ISPs to stop blocking certain domains, Return Path recommends that email marketers should try to avoid or reduce the problem with welcome messages, efficient opt-out procedures, and appropriate permission levels.
Source: eMarketer, “Are You Deceived by Your email Delivery Rate?” eMarketer, August 7, 2009
