Not to big of a surprise in terms of a stat headline, but Return Path today released a new Email Deliverability Benchmark Report that shows marketers may not be still not getting it or that some just can't get a break no matter what they do right.
Return Path looked at more than 500,000 campaigns to determine what percentage of email is delivered to the inbox versus being diverted to the bulk folder or completely undelivered/blocked/dropped. What's interesting in this report is that they also reveal that MSN, Hotmail, and Gmail Are The Toughest U.S. consumer inboxes to reach for marketers and Primus.ca, Shaw, Aliant, SaskTel, and Inter.net in Canada.
Commercial, permissioned emails reached only 79.3% of inboxes in the United States and Canada during the first half of 2009 (January through June), according to the report. With the undelivered email, 3.3% is routed to a "junk" or "bulk" email folder and 17.4% is not delivered at all – with no hard bounce message or other notification of non-delivery.
Hey Matt Verhout! The US deliverability rates are slightly better than Canada with an average of 82% inbox placement rate, while Canada's inbox placement rates are lower with just 75%. 
As I said in the beginning though I wasn't surprised by some of the stats in this report i.e. Business Inboxes are even tougher to reach or Deliverability rates vary by ISP. As they said in their report and that many should already know today is each ISP has a unique recipe for determining what is appropriate for inbox placement, much of which is based on feedback they get from their customers. Understanding deliverability at this granular level is important for marketers who want to optimize their email marketing efforts.
As my good friend Sam Masiello just twittered. "Goes to show that permission is not necessarily king. Content and relevancy are still key factors to good deliverability metrics"
You can read more here on Return Path's blog as well
-Dennis
Don't Just Send, Deliver!
Last 5 posts by Dennis Dayman
- European Data Protection "Upgrades" - January 30th, 2012
- Return Path acquires OtherInbox - January 10th, 2012
- How NOT to react to spam complaints - January 9th, 2012
- Care2 breach is something to care about - January 3rd, 2012
- The passing of a great mind and great friend - November 17th, 2011
>17.4% is not delivered at all – with no hard bounce message
>or other notification of non-delivery
I flat out don't believe this.
I suspect it's far more likely that the senders are failing to identify some bounces. Either email NDRs or uncategorized bounces that are being discarded.
Derek
or could it be that the sender is not looking at async's or treating them COMPLETELY different than sync's?
Yea, async's is what I meant by "email NDRs". Asyncs is a clearer term though.
And I suspect that's a good portion of that 17% because I find that 17% number completely incredible.
Derek
Derek, Dennis – Slight nuance here is that our report does not say that the non-delivered messages don’t return a bounce. We are simply reporting on the data we see in our Mailbox Monitor system which shows the percentage of our seedlist that is delivered to the inbox, to the junk folder and not delivered at all (what we call “missing”). For the purposes of this report, we are not comparing that data to any ESP data or client log reports. So the overlap between that number and the SMTP data is not known based on this data. Sorry for any confusion.
Tami M. Forman
Director, Corporate Communications
Return Path
"Asyncs is a clearer term though."
Huh?