Help Us, Help You

Before becoming Chairman of the Direct Marketing Association, one of the things I’d noticed over the years was that the association didn’t have a ton of primary market research on itself, sort of a classic case of the cobbler’s children having shoddy shoes.

Today we are launching a new survey to help us establish a baseline for awareness and perceptions of all aspects of the DMA on behalf of all members of the marketing community.

Whether or not you are a DMA or EEC member …

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NEW RESEARCH STUDY: Email Trends Are Shifting–Are Your Messages Following?

Today we released the second installment of our global report: “Mobile, Webmail, Desktops: Where Are We Viewing Email Now?” The study sheds light on the impact mobile is having on email viewership and unveils some interesting findings.

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Email Deliverability Still Plagues Commercial Email Senders Worldwide: Only 81% of Email Reaches the Inbox

Return Path, the world’s leading email certification and reputation monitoring company, today announced the findings from its “Global Email Deliverability Benchmark Report, 1H 2011.” The findings of the report indicate that email deliverability still plagues commercial email senders worldwide with only 81% of all permissioned email making it to the inbox. Globally, one out of every five emails or 7% land either in a spam or junk folder and 12% simply go missing—blocked by ISP-level filtering. While deliverability rates vary by each region, Return Path research points to three key factors: belief in the “bounce rate myth,” lack of financial accountability for deliverability failures and resistance to implementing best practices. The report also looks at B2B issues and the impact new filtering applications have on Inbox placement.

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NEWS RELEASE: Inbox placement rates drop 3.5% over 18 months in the United Kingdom

UK marketers’ emails are not delivered to their customers far more often than their French and German counterparts UK marketers continue to fail to reach the inboxes of millions of customers who want to receive their emails. Inbox placement rates …

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Word of the Week: Metrics

“You can’t manage what you can’t measure” goes the saying and marketers live and die by their numbers. What we measure helps determine how successful our email program really is. These metrics include bounces, opens, clicks, inbox placement, render, delivered, rejected, unknown user, spam trap, inactive, conversions, unsubscribe, deliverability, and the list goes on. I’ve gathered articles from the past couple of weeks that discuss email marketing metrics and how to measure and use them.

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Categories: Best Practices News Research View Comments

It’s 2011: Do You Know Where Your Email Is Being Read?

Today we released our newest study: “Email on the Move: The Future of Mobile Messaging.” The study examines when and how email is most often read. The results were exciting and have tremendous implications for email marketers. Did you know? …

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Mobile Email Study Finds 81% Growth in Email Activity on Mobile — iPad, Tablet Viewership Increasing

Marketers Need to Embrace Changing Email Habits New York, NY – May 17 , 2011 – Return Path, the world’s leading email certification and reputation monitoring company, today announced the findings from its “Email on the Move: The Future of …

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UK Email Marketers: Help is on the Way

It’s been an interesting few weeks in the world of email marketing in the UK.

First, the DMA released the results of their client survey that showed that email marketers are rightly concerned about the effect that deliverability challenges have on their email marketing success rates. The report – which Return Path sponsored – included the very surprising finding that UK marketers don’t have access to the metrics needed to assess their inbox placement rates (IPR) and that they aren’t very interested in gaining access to them. (You can download our version of this report – with a special forward by Return Path CEO Matt Blumberg)

Then, Return Path released new figures showing that…

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Email Marketers’ Misleading Metrics Count Email in Spam Folders as Delivered

Many European marketers are counting marketing emails that end up in spam folders as delivered messages.

Rather than monitoring inbox placement rates – which provide marketers with the actual number of emails being delivered to consumers’ inboxes – marketers are using a delivered rate metric, which counts emails that reach consumers’ inboxes minus emails that bounced back to the sender. This method does not take account of emails being delivered to spam folders or being blocked at ISP level and disappearing completely.

Measuring delivery rates using misleading statistics gives marketers an unrealistic view of the success of their email campaigns, according to Return Path’s new Deliverability and Reputation Handbook: A Guide to Achieving 100% Inbox Placement in Europe.

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Categories: Press Releases Research Return Path View Comments

News Release: Europe’s Emails Increasingly Going Missing

Requested emails blocked outright or shuttled into spam folders with little hope of being read.

European consumers are not receiving more than one in six of the emails they have requested from companies. 17.8 per cent of legitimate marketing emails sent to European consumers are not being delivered – either going missing completely or going straight into spam folders. This compares to one in seven emails to European consumers (14.6 per cent) not reaching inboxes six months ago.

The findings come from Return Path’s bi-annual European Email Deliverability Benchmark Report, which measures the email management of the largest Internet Service Providers (ISPs) across Europe.

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Categories: News Research Return Path View Comments