According to Return Path’s latest Deliverability Benchmark Report, only 79.3% of commercial, permissioned emails reached the inboxes in the United States and Canada during the first half of 2009. With the undelivered email, 3.3% is routed to a "junk" or "bulk" email folder and 17.4% is not delivered at all - with no hard bounce message or other notification of non-delivery.
Some other interesting findings from the study include:
- The US deliverability rates are slightly better than Canada with an average of 82% inbox placement rate, while Canada's inbox placement rates are lower with just 75% of commercial, permissioned emails reaching consumers' inboxes.
- Reaching business addresses, which are protected by systems like Postini, Symantec and MessageLabs, is even more difficult: on average only 72.4% of commercial email is delivered to the inbox through these enterprise systems!
- In the US, the toughest inboxes to reach are those at MSN, Hotmail and Gmail
Tamara Gielen is an independent email and digital direct marketing
consultant with over 10 years of experience in online, email and direct marketing. 
Comments