Email Deliverability is Still an Issue for Organizations

A recent study released by ReturnPath on email deliverability benchmarks for 2009 highlights the key issues that still plague organizations using email as a main marketing channel. ReturnPath, an email deliverability solutions provider, developed the study by reviewing data from 131 internet service providers (ISPs) in the United States, Canada Europe and Asia Pacific Territories in 2009.

Key highlights from the study show that:

• Deliverability remains an issue with non-delivery rates as high as 20% across the globe
• The second half of 2009 shows an inbox placement rate of just 80.1% for permission-based commercial email in the US and Canada
• Only 75.2% of email is delivered when being sent to business email addresses

The report goes on to give some reasons why deliverability is still a major issues for organizations that use email:

1. The bounce rate myth. According to ReturnPath, senders are generally given reports month after month that show a "delivered" metric that tends to be about 95%-98%, but in most cases, that metric is usually the bounce rate because the system they use is reporting the number of messages sent through the pipe and subtracting the number that return a hard bounce.
2. Revenue masks a lot of sins. ReturnPath says that email generates a lot of revenue and this tends to hide the amount of money lost due to deliverability failures.
3. Change is hard. Many senders are still choosing to stick to their old methods of email sending, rather than taking on new and emerging best practices to help their deliverability.

The main points of the report are here, but it has some great graphs which are worth taking a look at. The only critique we have of the report is the section regarding the "bounce rate myth". We agree with the rest of the challenges, we certainly see customer who use our email software having difficulty implementing and using best practices and having a strong idea of their real revenue from an email campaign. However, the "bounce rate myth" sounds like it's the issue with some systems, not all, and it seems unlikely that it is an global issue across the majority of email marketing platforms.

You can download your own copy of the report on ReturnPath's Website.

Posted by Amberlie Denny at December 7, 2010 8:00 AM

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