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RCeassee aSrtcuhd Sytudy
Emailing in the Dark: What European
Email Marketers Don't Understand
GET MORE INFO about Deliverability
First, the good news. Most European email marketers know that email doesn't rpinfo-europe@returnpath.net always get delivered to the inbox of the intended recipient. The bad news is 0845 002 0006 that a significant minority is still completely unaware that deliverability failures happen - that spam filters prevent legitimate emails from reaching users' inboxes. But even the European marketers who are aware of deliverability failures don't have access to the types of reports that could help them optimise their inbox placement rates.
Marketers should worry. Globally, around one of every five permission-based marketing emails never reach the inbox . They get dumped in the junk folder or simply go missing. There's a big upside to correcting this deliverability failure. Email that is not delivered to the inbox does not earn a response. Consumer research consistently shows that very few people go into their spam or junk folder to look for marketing messages that have been delivered there inadvertently. Of course the messages that don't even make it to the junk folder have absolutely no chance of being clicked on. Therefore, lifting inbox deliverability lifts all other response metrics as well as the return on investment from the email marketing.
At the heart of the problem is the fact that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) do Email marketers not report back to marketers when messages are diverted to the junk folder lack confidence or blocked from delivery. The only way for a marketer to know where their messages end up is to use a seedlist-based monitoring system. This means and knowledge on populating their database with known good email addresses at all the ISPs reaching the inbox to where they have customers, then monitoring whether those email addresses receive the email that gets sent. Gaining access to this data is crucial for earn higher revenues. marketers to understand how their email is really performing.
Finally, marketers need to understand their role in protecting their inbox delivery rates. Our study found that marketers tend to believe that their email service provider is solely responsible for deliverability. Most deliverability failures are caused by the marketer's poor data collection habits and complaints from email recipients in response to the content and frequency of the marketer's messages. Even the best email service provider cannot control these factors. These factors rest in the hands of the marketer alone.
If you have questions or would like to hear how Return Path can help, please call 0845 002 0006, visit www.returnpath.net or email rpinfo-europe@returnpath.net. © 2009 Return Path, Inc. v060209RCeasseea Srctuhd Sytudy
Marketers Do Not Have the Data They Need to Optimise Inbox Deliverability
Email marketers generally know that hitting "send" is not enough to ensure messages actually reach the inbox and appear in subscriber's inboxes as they intended (called "rendering"). The majority of survey respondents (61%) believe that some messages may be blocked by ISPs. Marketers tend to be most concerned about the largest ISPs, like BT, Free.fr, Neuf, Orange and T-Online, but the truth is that nearly every ISP, from the largest to the smallest, employs filtering technology to protect their customers from spam messages. However, more than one in three email marketing managers are woefully ignorant of this reality -26% say they do not believe messages get blocked at all and 12% just didn't know.
Of course it shouldn't really surprise us that marketers are unaware of deliverability failures since most email broadcasting systems - whether in-house or through a service provider - report a "delivered" statistic that is really the email bounce rate. The system records how many emails get sent, subtracts the number of bounces and reports the sum as "delivered". Since these systems also tend to do a good job of processing bounces this means that most marketers see a report that shows their email is being delivered at a rate of 95% or more. This definition is wrong and potentially misleading as it actually represents the number of messages that the service (ESP, MTA, etc.) passed to the internet, rather than the number of messages that actually reached subscribers' inboxes. If... [download for more]
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