Deliverability Critical To Email Success

Ten percent of emails are deleted before ever being read, according to a Return Path study released Tuesday.

The data solutions provider found that the average rate of emails deleted before reading across all industries remained steady at 9% throughout 2015, and that some of the worst business offenders included the office supplies, pet, and flower industries.

Return Path’s inaugural email engagement report, The Hidden Metrics of Email Deliverability, delves into an analysis of 2015 email engagement rates by industry, and was sourced from more than 3.5 billion commercial emails received last year. Most industry benchmark reports track the click and open rates of emails, but Return Path instead tracked the read rate, forward rate and complaint rate of emails on their platform.

The verticals with the highest read rate in 2015, according to the report, were utilities (47%) and distribution/manufacturing (31%) markets. On the opposite side of the spectrum were business/marketing and social/dating companies, which tied for the lowest reading rate at 9%.  

Not surprisingly, the utilities industry also had the highest email deliverability rate, with only 2% of emails on average being delivered to the spam folder. In contrast, the automotive parts and accessories industry ranked as the highest spammer of 2015 with 28% of all emails being delivered to the spam folder.

It doesn’t take a data scientist to see the correlation: more emails successfully being delivered into an inbox leads to increased email read rates. Deliverability is even more critical considering that the average email read rate is less than three seconds, per Movable Ink.

Spam complaints also increased in the fourth quarter of 2015 by an average of .5% per industry, according to Return Path, likely driven by the increased volume of promotional emails around the holidays.

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