Email delivery trends, issues and lessons

Latest posts | Feed | By Mark Brownlow on May 30, 2007

gmail inbox screenshotLyris just put out an interesting report on email delivery trends and issues in Q1, 2007. The thrust of the press release might be open to misinterpretation if reported glibly.

Lyris found that hundreds of email campaigns they analyzed didn't trigger filters looking for spammy content.

That does not mean that content filters are unimportant, as implied by some reports.

It means that those sending out emails have already worked out how not to trigger them. And it means existing delivery problems are therefore due to other things, specifically issues of sender reputation.

That's why Stefan Pollard notes in the press release that... "Changing a few keywords in the hopes of boosting inbox success rates is no substitute for adhering to email marketing best practices."

There are no shortcuts to better deliverability: your whole email marketing house needs to be in order.

The report looks at how top ISPs in the USA, Europe and elsewhere rate when it comes to delivering legitimate marketing emails to end user accounts. And in terms of putting those delivered emails in the right folder (the main inbox as opposed to a junk folder.)

The distinction is important.

For example, Gmail is very good at delivering legitimate marketing email, with less than 5% of emails filtered out en route. But a big chunk of those delivered emails got routed to the junk folder. Over a quarter in fact.

The lessons?
  • Delivery issues are still real. Even given that the more popular US ISPs all delivered over 90% of legitimate marketing emails, that's still plenty of potential clicks and sales going missing. And that's even before the issue of inbox/junk folder rerouting.
  • These figures are all averages, so presumably those following best practices are getting better results. So no cause for panic!
  • ISPs vary quite a big deal in their deliverability success. Hotmail, for example, dumped over 40% of delivered marketing email into the end user's junk folder. So it's important to tackle deliverability issues on a domain-by-domain basis.
Overall delivery numbers might be masking problems at specific ISPs and webmail services. Pull out the most popular address domains in your email list and take a closer look at what's happening there. Use test accounts or one of the delivery monitoring services.

More on deliverability | Tags: , ,

[This post brought to you by Campaigner Email Marketing]
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