U.S. Email Deliverability Drops, Global Rates Stagnant

More than a quarter of promotional emails sent in the United States fail to reach their intended recipient, according to Return Path’s annual email deliverability report.

Only 73% of promotional emails sent by American email marketers reach the correct inbox -- 6% below the global average.

The global email deliverability rate is 79%, according to Return Path, meaning that 21% of all email marketing messages fail to reach their intended recipient.

Return Path analyzed a representative sample of more than 2.5 billion promotional emails sent between April 2015 and June 2016 and across more than 140 global mailbox providers in its annual email deliverability benchmark report. Both spam trap emails and missing emails were included in the deliverability statistics.

Global email deliverability rates remain unchanged since Return Path released its 2015 benchmark report. Although global inbox placements also remain unchanged, Return Path spotlights the growth, or recession, of country-specific deliverability rates.

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Canada experienced the highest surcharge of inbox placement rates, according to the study -- jumping from 79% deliverability in 2015 to 89% deliverability in 2016, likely as email marketers were forced to practice cleaner list hygiene tactics due to the CASL spam law that went into effect in July 2014.

CASL, or the Canadian Anti-Spam Law, enforces new fines and consequences for email spammers. 

Australia and the United Kingdom earned the highest inbox placement rates worldwide, with 90% and 88% of emails reaching itheir intended recipient, respectively.

Spain, Germany and France all showed above average deliverability rates as well, numbering in the low to mid 80s.

On the other end of the spectrum, the United States has seen its email deliverability sharply decline over the past two years. U.S. email deliverability rates have dropped from 87% in 2014, 76% in 2015 and 73% in 2016. 

1 comment about "U.S. Email Deliverability Drops, Global Rates Stagnant".
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  1. Julia Gulevich from G-Lock Software, August 5, 2016 at 10:30 a.m.

    Great article, Jess! Thank you for sharing.


    Email deliverability is a vital problem in today's email marketing. The reasons causing email deliverability issues can vary from list hygiene to message content. In a lot of cases, email marketers stay in the dark as to why their emails are filtered out as spam or blocked altogether.

    The best way to find out the root cause for the email filtering or blocking is testing. The simplest approach is testing email subject and content. If it makes no difference, marketers should go deeper and test their sending domain/email address and sending IP. Blacklisted sending IP's are often a real problem.


    I wrote a blog post about how to find and fix deliverability issues through testing. The article includes a PDF with the 13-point checklist that might help people verify that everything is OK with their sending program.

    I think it might be a great addition and might be interesting to the readers of this post. I hope it is fine to share a link here https://glockapps.com/tutorials/fix-email-deliverability/


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