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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Categories: Press Releases Research Return Path 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.

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Word of the Week: Security

The past week had some announcements in the email security realm and how email providers are helping to secure the channel for everyone involved. Here are some of the more noteworthy articles and blogs to share on the topic.

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Categories: Commentary Return Path View Comments

A Marketer’s Field Guide to ISPs and Deliverability

Email marketers are intensely focused on ROI for their marketing dollars. Maximizing the number of clicks, opens and conversions is the primary method that ROI is measured for most marketers. However, maximizing all of these response metrics requires that your email is delivered to your subscribers’ inbox by the ISPs (Internet Service Providers). This metric is commonly referred to as deliverability or inbox placement rate.

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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.

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Is Priority Inbox a Priority?

I was thrilled to have the opportunity with Media Post at their Email Insider Summit to moderate a panel session on the new inbox engagement trends that have become prevalent in the market. And to make the experience even better, I had three wonderful industry insiders joining me on the panel: Joel Book, Principal of eMarketing Education for Exact Target, Josh Glantz, VP of Online Marketing for Publishers Clearing House, and Marc Haseltine, Email and Alternative Marketing for National Geographic.

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Categories: Best Practices Return Path View Comments

A follow-up on Marketing Sherpa’s webinar “Improve Email Deliverability: Tactics for Handling Complaints and Boosting Reputation”

Return Path and Marketing Sherpa joined forces to present a webinar on how to deal with complains. The turnout and questions were great. So great in fact, that we ran out of time to answer them all. Along with Marketing Sherpa co-presenter Adam Sutton, we decided to answer the questions in a two part blog series. Here’s the first.

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Categories: Explanation How-To Return Path View Comments

Lacking a Common Language

Human communication takes many forms, from the dense poetry of Shakespeare’s plays to the rigorous precision of IETF documents to the false apologies conveyed by emoticons. Metaphors seem like the greatest thing since sliced bread, while verbal puns can creep up on the unwary like a faux queue in arrears. But at the end of the day, when all is said and done, like a bull in a china shop, inaccurate cliches and colloquialisms can actually impede communication — particularly technical communication.

Some of the terms I see floating around the industry are silly and annoying, but …

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Same Spam, Different Day

McAfee just released their March 2010 spam report.

The good news: as a percentage of email, spam has remained flat.

The very bad news: Overall email volume is way up so the amount of spam has gone way up too. Translation: there is a lot more crap clogging up the system.

For large inbox providers a move toward systems that …

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See, We Told You Email Isn't Dead

When people at email companies write articles titled “Email Isn’t Dead, We Swear!” it’s hard not to be suspicious. Clearly we’ve got some skin in this game. Nevertheless, I wrote my column for MediaPost last week on why I believe email is still the killer app. I was careful to include data to back up my argument so that it’s not just about my opinion. And so I’m delighted to see more great data that confirms what we know …

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