At a recent Direct Gardening Association conference, presenter Ken Lane of Hathaway and Lane cited a study by Return Path that found that 16.3% of commercial, permissioned emails never reach the inbox they were sent too – and no bounce notification is ever received.
I thought I may have misheard, so I looked up the study. Sure enough: in North America, an average of 16.3% of all commercial is lost in cyberspace with no notification, and another 3.5% lands in the junk folder. That’s nearly 20% of all emails down the drain. Think of the income that represents!
You can download the report free at the Return Path website. When you do, you’ll also receive a link to download a Best Practice Guide to help improve deliverability. According to Return Path, best practices can increase deliverability to nearly 99%.
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4 Comments
We recently went through the Return Path certification and it has dramatically improved our deliverability rates. Practically all mail now reaches our subscribers inboxes, so it definitely works.
Good to know, Jeremy!
If I could just get 40 percent of the people who DO receive the email to open it, I’d be happy with that.
My question after hearing that is whether Constant Contact’s deliverability is really that bad?
Or is this just an average based on lots and lots of people using in-house systems that can easily get banned by various ISPs who are overzealous.
Part of the problem is that people either don’t believe that unsubscribe really works or are too lazy to do it, so they just click the spam button instead when they’re tired of getting your emails.
Well, Constant Contact says that Return Path reports their deliverability to be above 97%. I would think that most of Constant Contact’s competitors would be in the same range, and that would account for the bulk of commercial email — which is why I found the average deliverability numbers that Return Path cited so surprising.