REPORT: More Than 20 Percent of Permission-Based Emails Aren't Delivered in U.S., Canada

Report attributes deliverability problems to "bounce rate myth" and email's high ROI.

By Chandra Johnson-Greene
Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Commercial, permission-based emails reached only 79.3 percent of inboxes in the U.S. and Canada during the first half of 2009, according to email services provider Return Path’s Deliverability Benchmark Report.

And as for the undelivered email, 3.3 percent is routed to a "junk" or "bulk” email folder and 17.4 percent is not delivered at all—with no hard bounce message or other notification of non-delivery.

"Many marketers aren't even aware that one-fifth of their emails are never reaching the inbox," George Bilbrey, president and co-founder, Return Path, said in a statement. "In many cases, marketers are seeing ‘delivered’ metrics that repeatedly show a 95 percent to 98 percent delivery rate. 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 report also attributed deliverability problems to the fact that email generates a lot of revenue. “While deliverability failures cost businesses money, this can be masked by the revenue generated by every campaign that goes out the door,” the report stated.

The rate of email deliverability varies by ISP, the report also found. Gmail was found to be the most difficult—23 percent of emails delivered did not reach intended recipients—followed by Hotmail (20 percent), MSN (20 percent), Comcast (17 percent), and AOL (16 percent).

For the report, Return Path studied data from 45 ISPs in the U.S. and Canada and more than 500,000 email campaigns conducted from January to June 2009 that used the Mailbox Monitor seed list system.