More Than 20% of Commercial, Permissioned Emails Are Not Delivered to Inboxes in the United States and Canada, According to New Return Path Study

MSN, Hotmail, and Gmail Are The Toughest U.S. Consumer Inboxes To Reach For
Marketers
NEW YORK--(Business Wire)--
As the global recession grinds on, marketers increasingly turn to email
marketing to engage consumers and drive sales. Yet, those efforts are being
thwarted by continued email deliverability failures. In the United States and
Canada more than 20% of email doesn`t reach the inboxes of intended subscribers.

Commercial, permissioned emails reached only 79.3% of inboxes in the United
States and Canada during the first half of 2009 (January through June),
according to the new Return Path Deliverability Benchmark Report. 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. However, marketers don`t have to treat 79.3% delivery rates as an
acceptable cost of doing business. Return Path has found that many marketers who
identify and address deliverability issues can reach 99% deliverability rates.

"Many marketers aren`t even aware that one-fifth of their emails are never
reaching the inbox," said George Bilbrey, President, co-founder, Return Path.
"In many cases, marketers are seeing "delivered" metrics that repeatedly show a
95% to 98% delivery rate. Unfortunately, many ESPs and marketers have developed
the belief that whatever emails aren`t bouncing have successfully reached the
inbox. That`s just not true, as these numbers show. Marketers need to examine
their current deliverability stats, and remember that hard bounces aren`t the
only emails that aren`t reaching your subscribers."

The US deliverability rates, according to the new Return Path Deliverability
Benchmark Report, 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.

Failure to Reach the Inbox Means Failure to Generate Revenue

Email marketing continues to perform as a powerful direct marketing tool. The
Direct Marketing Association just projected that email marketing will generate
an ROI of $43.52 in 2009, twice the return earned by search and other marketing
channels.

The continued success of email marketing often disguises the lingering email
deliverability issues highlighted by the Return Path Deliverability Benchmark
Report. What many marketers may not realize is that their already good email
performance could be even better if more of their emails were reaching consumers
inboxes.

For example, if a company with a file size of 100,000 email records earns an
average of $1 per email sent, they are missing out on an additional $20,000 from
every email campaign with an inbox placement rate of 80%. It`s not uncommon for
marketers to reach 99% deliverability if they invest the time and attention and
are diligent and thorough about improving and maintaining their deliverability.

Different ISPs, Different Rules, Different Delivery Rates

Successful deliverability to consumers` inboxes varies by ISP. Gmail, Google`s
email service, is the most stringent US-based ISP for permissioned marketers to
reach, according to the report. Twenty-three percent of emails that marketers
sent to Gmail addresses did not reach the inbox.

The top five United States ISPs ranked in order of difficulty for marketers`
emails to reach users` inboxes are Gmail, Hotmail, MSN, Comcast, and AOL.

Marketers face an even tougher time reaching Canadian inboxes. Primus.ca which
uses Postini as part of its email filtering system, failed to deliver 53% of
emails that marketers sent to Primus.ca users. The top five Canadian ISPs ranked
in order of difficulty for marketers` emails to reach consumers inboxes are
Primus.ca, Shaw, Aliant, SaskTel, and Inter.net.

Marketers face an even tougher time reaching business email addresses that are
often protected by additional layers of email monitoring including systems such
as Postini, Symantec and MessageLabs. On average, 27.6% of commercial emails
sent to business addresses don`t reach the inbox.

"Return Path has been at the forefront of championing email industry standards
for marketers and ISPs. Standards help legitimate marketers successfully reach
the consumers who have requested emails, and ISPs can further distinguish
permissioned email from spam," Bilbrey said. "However, as ISPs continue their
daily battle to keep consumers` inboxes protected from the onslaught of spam,
legitimate commercial emails that consumer want to receive aren`t being
delivered. It`s imperative that marketers dig into their deliverability stats to
truly see how many of their emails are successfully reaching the inbox."

To compile the Return Path Deliverability Benchmark Report, Return Path
exhaustively studied extensive data from more than 500,000 email campaigns
conducted from January to June 2009 that used the Mailbox Monitor seed list
system. Return Path recorded whether the emails were missing, received in the
inbox or filtered to the junk/spam folders (for those ISPs that use such a
folder). Return Path studied data from 45 ISPs in the United States and Canada
for this report.

About Return Path

Founded in 1999, Return Path helps commercial email senders get more email
delivered to the inbox. Our tools and services give senders the insight and
resources to diagnose and prevent email deliverability and rendering failures by
improving and maintaining their email sending reputations. Our Professional
Services division then helps our client improve ROI and response by creating
consistent and compelling subscriber experiences across the email customer
lifecycle. Return Path runs the internet's most widely used third-party
whitelist, the Return Path Certification Program. Return Path also invented the
Sender Score, an email reputation measure based on data contributed by ISPs and
other receivers of large volume email into the Return Path Reputation Network.
We offer free access to our Sender Score to any sender, receiver or consumer of
email at our reputation portal: www.senderscore.org. Information about Return
Path can be found at www.returnpath.net.

for Return Path
Jeff Rutherford, 413-475-0087
jeff@jeffrutherford.com
or
Return Path
Tami M. Forman, 212-905-5500 ext 205
tami.forman@returnpath.net

Copyright Business Wire 2009