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.

Tell me more

Categories: Press Releases Research Return Path View Comments

A Marketer’s Field Guide to Comcast Inboxes

Comcast is the largest cable provider in the United States with 22 million subscribers comprising 32 million active mailboxes. Their email user base is made up of paid subscribers to their Internet service. Comcast provides a reliable email service with lots of storage. Unlike other North American cable providers, Comcast has invested significantly in their email service which includes a snappy Zimbra-based web interface.

Tell me more

Categories: Best Practices Commentary Explanation Return Path View Comments

A Marketer’s Field Guide to AOL Inboxes

You’ve got mail! After more than a decade, AOL is still a major webmail player in the United States. Most reports rank AOL #4 in total mailboxes behind Microsoft Hotmail Live, Yahoo! and Gmail respectively. The company has a global reach but its presence is about half of the other major players if you count their number of worldwide mailboxes.

Tell me more

Categories: Best Practices Commentary Explanation View Comments

Wednesday’s Word(s) of The Week: Spear Phishing

I’d like to dive into another security topic that everyone needs to be aware of, one that most people have been a target of, and that no one wants to be a victim of, namely spear phishing. Spear phishing is a highly targeted attack towards an individual that uses things like personalization and often uses a spoofed From: address that is recognizable to the recipient, like an email from your husband or wife asking for your social security number for benefits enrollment, when it’s actually not your husband or wife, but a fraudster.

Tell me more

Categories: Best Practices News View Comments

The Newest Return Path Study Explains Why I Keep Talking about Reputation

I’ve been writing about reputation and why it’s so important on this blog for years (the first recorded instance is from back in 2006). I’ve explained why you need to pay attention to reputation, and I’ve even called reputation the “King” (83% of the time).

Why do I think your reputation so important? Before I answer that question, let’s start with a more fundamental one – why is inbox placement important?

Tell me more

Categories: Best Practices Return Path View Comments

Marketing Sherpa Features an Email Marketing Sweepstakes Winner

We’re happy to see one of our marquee clients, Publishers Clearing House (PCH) featured in Marketing Sherpa. Marketing Sherpa focused on PCH’s 99.2% deliverability rate despite heavy usage of “blacklisted” words.

Tell me more

Categories: Best Practices View Comments

How Inactive Addresses Hurt Deliverability plus 3 Tips on What to Do

Inactive subscribers are a liability to anyone who sends email. They hurt deliverability, which in turn reduces your response rates, and before you know it, your email program isn’t making as money as it used to. Marketing managers usually understand that the key is to get rid of the deadweight to solve these problems, but most executives try to solve the revenue problem through a numbers game and sending to even more email addresses, many of which are inactive as well. So why should you care about removing inactive addresses?

Tell me more

Categories: Best Practices Commentary How-To View Comments

New is Old? Or Old is New Again?

The temperature wasn’t the only thing that was high on the first day of the Email Insider Summit. Record attendance spurred highly interactive panel sessions on day one, and the buzz continued throughout the day in roundtable discussions and subsequent events. The topics of the first conference day were focused entirely on the new and emerging among the industry, including: real-time marketing, innovations in technology, and changes in webmail interfaces.

Tell me more

Categories: Commentary Return Path View Comments

Bulking at Gmail and Hotmail

Some of our clients have recently inquired about increased bulking at Gmail and Hotmail. Additionally, senders and ESPs throughout the email marketing industry have noticed an increase in bulking at Gmail and bulking and deferrals at Hotmail.

Tell me more

Categories: Best Practices Commentary View Comments

New Intelligence Data Drives the Latest Release of Our Deliverability Monitoring Suite

Today, I am proud to announce that by listening to our clients and the marketplace, we have made some major enhancements to our Deliverability Monitoring Suite, providing email marketers with the information they need to more effectively get into the inbox, increase response rate and provide more visibility and insight into subscribers and ISP filtering.

Tell me more

Categories: News Return Path View Comments