8 in 10 Commercial Emails Reach Inbox

September 23, 2011

returnpath-global-commerical-email-deliverability-h1-2011-sept11.gifGlobally, only eight in 10 (81%) commercial emails reached their intended inbox in the first half of 2011, according to a study released in September 2011 by ReturnPath. Results from “The Global Email Deliverability Benchmark Report” indicate the remaining roughly one in five emails that do not reach the inbox wind up either in a spam/junk folder (7%) or are blocked by ISP-level filtering (12%).

Regionally, North America has the highest rate of commercial emails reaching the inbox (86%), followed by Europe (84%), Asia-Pacific (78%) and Caribbean/Latin America (62%).

B2B Deliverability Rates Similar

returnpath-b2b-email-deliverability-sep-2011.JPGCommercial emails targeted to B2B recipients have similar global success rates to overall commercial emails. Eighty percent reach the intended inbox, while 8% wind up in a spam/junk folder and 12% are blocked by ISP-level filtering.

ReturnPath analysis indicates this is a 5% improvement from 2009, when just 75.2% of commercial B2B emails made it to the inbox. The study advises the multiple company-level filtering methods used for business email addresses mean that deliverability is still a major concern. At the default setting, a lot of mail remains undelivered.

Canada has High Rate of Blocked Email

Examining commercial email success rates in the two countries comprising North America, the study finds Canada, with a roughly 85% success rate, has a disproportionately high rate of blocked emails (12%). Meanwhile, the US has an 86% success rate, with only 6% of commercial emails blocked.

German Spam Filters on Overdrive

Looking more closely at the commercial email success rates of Germany, France and the UK, the study finds Germany has both the lowest success rate of these three nations (82.1%) and highest spam rate (15.1%). In contrast, France has an 86.2% success rate and 7.9% spam rate, while the UK has a similar 86% success rate and 7.8% spam rate.

Australia, China Show Vastly Different Trends

Demonstrating how wide the difference in commercial email success rates can be between two countries in the same region, the study drills down into the rates of two Asia-Pacific nations: Australia and China. Australia has an 89% success rate, with 6% blocked. In contrast, China has a success rate of only 58%, with 39% of commercial emails blocked.

Epsilon: 7 in 10 Q2 Biz Emails Mktg Messages

About seven in 10 (69.8%) business emails sent via the Epsilon Dream platform during Q2 2011 were marketing messages, according to data from Epsilon and the Email Experience Council. Data from “Q2 2011 Email Trends & Benchmarks” indicates this figure is about 5% higher than the 66.7% of emails which were marketing messages in Q1 2011. A majority of the remaining emails (25.1%) fell into the “other” category, with small percentages consisting of service, acquisition and editorial emails.

Service emails had the highest open rate (42.8%) by a wide margin. The next-highest open rate, for editorial emails, was about 35% lower at 27.4%. Service emails also had the highest click rate (8.9%), closely followed by editorial emails (8.3%). Editorial emails had the highest click-to-open rate (30.4%), followed by research emails (25.9%).

About the Data: ReturnPath reviewed data from 149 ISPs in North America, Central and Latin America, Europe, Asia and the Asia Pacific territories from January through June 2011.

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