• by Jack Loechner , Staff Writer @mp_research, October 6, 2011

According to the Return Path report, "Global Email Deliverability Benchmark Report, 1H 2011," only 81% of all permissioned email from commercial email senders makes it to the inbox. Globally, one out of every five emails is not delivered to the intended recipient, with 7% landing either in a spam or junk folder and 12% simply missing.

Senders continue to believe that whatever gets sent and doesn't bounce must be reaching the inbox. This isn't the case. Senders are only notified when their email is a hard bounce, not if it's been placed in a junk or spam folder. The rate senders must understand is their inbox placement rate, the number of emails that actually arrive in the inbox.

North American deliverability is globally the highest with 86% of emails making it to the intended recipient. Canada has a high rate of email that goes missing at 12.2% but only 2.56% is delivered to the spam or junk folder. The United States has a more equal balance of email that goes missing at 5.9% and email delivered to the junk or spam folder at 7.56%, says the report.

In Europe, for the first half of 2011, approximately one in six legitimate emails or 16.5% never reached the subscriber inbox. Additionally, more than one in ten commercial emails or 10.4% go missing, blocked by ISPs before reaching their intended recipient. In comparison, Europe lags a full three percentage points at 83.5% behind North American deliverability rates at 86.5%.

In Central and Latin America, 62%, or the equivalent of only 6 out of every 10 emails make it to the inbox. Of the remaining 38% of emails, 21% are rejected at the ISP-level and 17% are put in the junk or spam folders. This is particularly problematic in Brazil. With a full 25% of all permissioned email being delivered to the spam or junk folders and one out of every 10 emails or 11% going missing, only 64% of all email gets delivered to Brazilian inboxes.

With more than 1 in 5 emails or 78% never making it to the inbox across Asia Pacific, Australia posts a strong inbox placement rate of 89%, with only 6% going missing and 5% being sent to the junk or spam folders. The email delivery situation in China doesn't meet the benchmark for the rest of the APAC region with only 58% of permissioned email sent actually reaching the recipient. Largely, 39% of email is missing due to being blocked at the ISP level and only 3% is delivered to the spam or junk folders.

Reaching business addresses continues to be difficult as inboxes are protected by systems like Postini, Symantec and MessageLabs. Only 80% of email is delivered to the inbox through these enterprise systems. While this is a 5% improvement from 2009 when just 75.2% made it to the inbox, the multiple company-level filtering methods used for business addresses mean that deliverability is still a major concern.

 Matt Blumberg, CEO of Return Path, concludes that "... what marketers don't know about their deliverability leaves their business vulnerable and decreases... revenue (generated) from their email channel... relevant deliverability data... is crucial... "

For additional information from Return Path, please visit here, or go to sign up for the PDF file here.