A startling 1 in 6 emails worldwide (approximately 50 million) don’t reach inboxes, with
messages to Gmail inboxes more successfully placed and read than any other large mailbox provider, particularly if the messages were sent to the ‘Promotions’ tab, according to new research.
The study, from Return Path sampled nearly 500 million messages from permissioned email marketers.
The report found that 11 per cent of all email messages went missing and another 6 per cent were delivered to subscribers’ spam or junk folders. Consistent with last year’s findings, reaching the inbox remains a significant challenge for commercial senders.
Return Path found that the relative constancy of global Inbox Placement Rates (IPR) – the percentage of sent email delivered to addressees’ inboxes – falls apart on a country-by-country comparison:
• Australian and German senders, top-rated in this study, failed to deliver one-in-eight messages to the inbox during 2013
• Brazilian senders reached the inbox only 60 per cent of the time, with nearly one-third of their messages disappearing altogether
• While the US and UK reached the inbox 87 per cent of the time, no country’s marketers were able to break the 90 per cent 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.
Gmail’s Shopping Folder: Inbox Placement and the Promotions Tab
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 per cent of legitimate commercial messages sent to them; moreover they tended to read those messages: Read rates for messages in the Promotions tab approached 20 per cent 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.
Holiday Inbox Placement Holds Steady, with an Assist from Apple
During a period that might be expected to suppress inbox placement with a surge in marketing email volume, the holidays instead maintained roughly constant deliverability – at least for campaigns from legitimate marketers. Lower complaint rates probably exerted the strongest influence on Q4 inbox placement rates and mobile devices may have played a contributing role. For the first time in November more than 50 per cent of email messages were opened on mobile devices – the majority of them iPhones and iPads. Consumers using the native Apple mail client were unable to file spam complaints as easily as other users. As a result this growing segment of the user population may appear to mailbox providers to be more satisfied with their commercial email than those reading mail on their desktops.
“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,” said George Bilbrey, Return Path co-founder and president. “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 program by 10- to 20-per cent 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.”
Return Path’s Inbox Placement Benchmark Report also highlights worldwide inbox placement by industry sector and examines the evolution of measurement in response to rapidly diversifying email applications and consumer behaviour, increasingly individualised mailbox provider decision making, and the rising influence of subscriber engagement on deliverability
The complete study, including infographics, can be downloaded here.
Methodology
Return Path conducted this study using a representative sample of more than 492 million commercial email messages sent with permission to consumers around the world between May 2013 and April 2014. Global and regional statistics are based on performance across more than 150 mailbox providers in North America, South America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific regions; country- and industry-specific statistics are based on a subset of senders whose location and industry classifications are identifiable.
