Many companies in the business of reaching its customers online assume that it is an easy endeavor to send an email to the customers on its customer based listings. In fact, it is not so easy to ensure that the messages sent to customers will get to them at all. Delivering an email to a consumer inbox is easier if the company sending the email is a European marketing entity. In the U.S. and neighboring Canada, stricter rules prevent around 20% of emails from ever getting through. This means that only 80% of the permission-based commercially marketed emails sent arrived at the intended destination. These figures, according to the survey, show an increase as noted from the first six months of the year.
On the other hand, junk and bulk based emails held steady at around the 3% mark, as seen in the period from July to December. Unfortunately for the marketers sending emails to customers on their list, 16% of the email messages never got to the intended customer at all. This figure depicts a decrease in the amount noted as deliverable emails, from seen earlier in the year.
So, who is winning at delivering the most emails? The European marketers are winning, and the stakes could not be higher. Return Path surveyed these companies and found that 85% of their emails went to the intended recipients. In fact, only 3.6% of the permission-based emails were sent to the junk or recycle bin, and only 11% were considered MIA or not deliverable.
What accounts for these differences? The U.S. and Europe internet systems take a different approach to ISP filtering, according to George Bilbrey, current president of Return Path. He states, “European ISPs do much more content delivery filtering.” This means that the ISPs are savvy to the key words that are triggers to alerting that spam is being sent. Bilbrey goes on to say, “North American ISPs tend to use reputation more when deciding if an e-mail gets delivered.” This can be interpreted to mean that if a reputable company is sending the email, it has a good chance of eventually being seen, not so with unscrupulous companies sending bulk spam to unwary consumers.
Other groups such as companies in the Asia Pacific region and China, were also high performers when compared to even Europe and North America. Asia Pacific placed upwards of almost 87% into the inbox, with only 3% of the email sent to bulk or spam and 10.7% considered missing. For China, the emails were delivered at higher rates if they were sent from within its borders, as opposed to having been sent from elsewhere.
What does this all mean for the North American marketers? Return Path notes that emails sent to Europe from North America enjoyed similar delivery rates as those from European marketers. This may mean that marketing departments in America may have to reconsider their strategies if they want to ensure that their messages are being delivered to the inboxes of their preferred customers in global markets.
Source: http://www.dmnews.com/deliverability-tougher-in-us-than-europe-return-path-survey/article/162994/
