Is email delivery more difficult now?

Only 76.5% of emails arrive in the inbox, according to the latest Global Email Deliverability Benchmark from Return Path. This is a drop of 5.5% based on the same report from the first half of 2011, and does not make for good reading if you’re an email marketer. It means that one in four emails sent is not reaching the inbox. To understand what has really happened we need to look at the figures in more detail.

Email deliverability by global regions
The first thing you realise when you read the report is that email deliverability varies drastically across the different regions. The best case for deliverability is Europe (EMEA) with 85% of emails reaching the inbox. Then it is North America (NOAM) with 79%,Central and Latin America (CALA) with 72% and Asia (APAC) with only 67%.

Although email marketing is worldwide, for most people reading this article I will assume that the vast majority of campaigns are targeted at Europe and North America. If we isolate these regions from the others then this gives a deliverability average of 82%.

Email deliverability better in Europe than North America
If we apply the same split to the report from the first half of 2011 then the figure is 85%. Soemail deliverability has still become more difficult for EMEA and NOAM but it might not be as bad as the headline figure suggests. One interesting point to note is the switch between Europe and North America for having the best rate.

In H1 2011, North America was leading with 86% closely followed by Europe with 84%. This drop in NOAM delivery could be attributed to the major internet service providers (ISPs) placing more emphasis on sender reputation and stricter filtering, and Gmail Inbox.

B2B email deliverability is up
Global deliverability for B2B email is up 6% to 86% from the previous report with 11% being marked as spam. This is a large percentage of spam when you look at the overall figure for each region, but there are fundamental differences when examining delivery for B2C and B2B. In a B2B list each email address could be to a different domain whereas in a B2C list there are a limited number of major domains you will be sending to. If we say that each domain has its own email security then that’s a lot of systems to worry about in a B2B list.

This can, however, be an advantage to B2B delivery since blocking by one domain does not necessarily mean you will be blocked by others, unless of course you are blacklisted. The downside is that you or your email service provider (ESP) is not going to have a relationship with every administrator to work on delivery issues and ensure a good delivery rate.

Also the security and filters associated with B2B is often multi-tiered. First you need to navigate your way through the corporate spam filter, then there might be a branch office server with its own filters and finally you have mail clients with their own filtering system.

B2C email deliverability challenges
This doesn’t mean that B2C email delivery is simple and without its problems. The filtering and blocking employed by the large ISPs is complicated and always evolving. They monitor billions of emails and alter the rules accordingly. You have to build and monitor your email eputation and you have the added issue of navigating priority inboxes and other tools implemented by the ISPs.

In conclusion, email deliverability is definitely becoming increasingly difficult. ESPs are investing more and more time and money to get emails into the inbox, and yet the latestReturn Path survey still shows that deliverability has dropped. It is important to understand your target audience and monitor your results on a regular basis paying close attention to your open and complaint rates.

However, in a recent blog article I read on Word to the Wise it was pointed out that there may yet be an upside to harder deliverability. If you email lands in the inbox it might be more likely to be read.

Simon Hill, technical director, Extravision

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