One in six emails undelivered

One in every six email messages sent worldwide by brands never even reaches the subscriber’s inbox, with 11% of all email messages going missing and another 6% ending up in spam folders, despite consumers opting in to receive them.
That is the key finding of Return Path’s annual Inbox Placement Benchmark Report, based on a sample of nearly 500 million messages from permissioned email marketers.
While the US and UK reached the inbox 87% of the time, no country’s marketers were able to break the 90% inbox placement threshold. Overall, European marketers struggled more than others with missing messages, but saw less mail routed to subscribers’ spam folders than North American senders did.
However, senders had the easiest time hitting their marks when their target was a Gmail inbox – but only when their messages were routed to the Promotions tab. Gmail users consistently received more than 90% of legitimate commercial messages sent to them. Moreover, they tended to read those messages, with read rates for messages in the Promotions tab approaching 20% in 2014, which is among the highest for any large mailbox provider.
Senders that followed Google’s suggestion not to ask subscribers to redirect promotional messages into their Primary tabs have been collectively successful at reaching and engaging their audiences. On the other hand, campaigns meant to convince users to override placement in the Promotions tab failed almost universally: very few Gmail users complied, and inbox placement for those that did was sharply lower in 2014.
Return Path co-founder and president George Bilbrey said: “While we continue to see promising headway in some regions and industry sectors, reaching the inbox continues to be a struggle for marketers across the globe.
“The same challenges that kept reputable senders from consistently reaching subscribers a few years ago are still there, joined recently by new complications as mailbox providers push to keep unwanted mail out of the inbox.
“The potential to expand the reach of an email programme by 10 to 20% remains a key lever to drive stronger performance, though, and developing an understanding of the interplay between inbox placement and engagement, reputation, and marketing tactics is critical to maximising email ROI.”