Don't be fooled by your delivery reports

The latest ISP Deliverability Report Card from Lyris always makes interesting reading. I can never make complete sense of the numbers given, but the basic takeaway is this:

Typically, just under 18% of the opt-in emails sent out get diverted into the recipient's junk/spam folder.

"So what?" I hear you say smugly, "My campaign reports tell me my delivery rates are near 100% so it's the competition that obviously has a problem."

Paraphrasing from an older article on campaign reports:

Typical reports calculate the delivery rate based on the number of emails sent minus the number that were "returned to sender," i.e. the bounces.

Unfortunately, this "delivered" number does not take account of emails silently deleted by various anti-spam mechanisms in place around the Internet. Nor those emails that get delivered to the recipient, but diverted into their spam or junk folder.

In other words, the number given in your reports does not tell you the number of emails that actually end up in an inbox.

How do you know if you have a problem?

Various services offer inbox monitoring as part of a broader deliverability service package. And dedicated monitoring services are popping up, like Delivery Watch or EmailReach.

Note also that the 18% figure is an aggregate number given by Lyris. When you look at individual ISPs, the percentages of incoming opt-in mail getting diverted into junk folders can vary enormously.

So the problem may be much worse (or better) depending on the makeup of your list.

What can you do about it?

Deliverability is a big topic. But the quick and twee answer is:

• Regular removal of dead addresses through list and bounce management
• Keep spam complaints down by making it easy to unsubscribe
• Keep spam complaints down by only sending to those who expressly requested your emails, and then meeting their expectations by making your emails relevant and valuable (not the first time you read that advice I expect).

P.S. Don't expect your subscribers to make the effort to retrieve permission-based emails that land in the wrong folder. According to Merkle, 73% of those consumers aware that requested emails can get wrongly identified as spam, "...don't care that this is occurring."

Tags: email marketing, email deliverability, spam filters, spam, anti-spam

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