Email marketing inbox placement drops 4%

Fewer marketing emails are reaching their intended recipients, despite consumers opting in to receive them, according to new research.

The study, from Return Path, indicates that just 79% of marketing messages reached consumers’ inboxes in the past year, which is representative of a significant 4% decline.

The rest were delivered to spam folders or weren’t delivered at all. This represents a decline over 2014 when 83% of commercial email reached the inbox worldwide.

The annual report shows that email marketers are faring worse and meeting greater challenges than ever before.

For the second year running, no major European country was able to break the 90% inbox placement mark.

The UK saw a significant decline – falling 5% – though with a score of 82% successful placement remained ahead of the global average, and still performed better than France and Germany.

Email marketers in the US fared even worse than the global average, reaching their subscribers’ inboxes only 76% of the time. Only one country included in the study, Brazil, represented a more difficult email marketing challenge, with 74% of messages reaching Brazilian consumers inboxes.

Globally a number of highly email-dependent industries bucked the poor inbox placement trend this year: messages from brands in the apparel (92%), food and beverage (93%), hospitality (87%), and travel (85%) sectors reached consumers more reliably than others. Meanwhile messages from media and entertainment (73%) and telecommunications (74%) senders were less likely to reach their targets.

“The inbox is becoming harder to reach partly because mailbox providers are applying increasingly sophisticated algorithms to understand what content their users truly value,” said Return Path President George Bilbrey. “As signals from individual subscribers play a bigger role in determining whose messages they see in their inboxes, email marketers that maintain their ability to consistently reach audiences will be distinguished by two critical, data-driven skills. The winners will analyze subscriber engagement to develop email programs that consumers genuinely care about, and they will rely on reputation and deliverability data to see their email performance as mailbox providers see it, and take fast action to correct downward trends.”

Return Path’s 2015 Deliverability Benchmark Report, including inbox placement statistics by country and by industry, can be downloaded here.

Methodology

This year’s representative sample of 357 million email marketing messages tracked for the Return Path study were sent by recognised brands to subscribers that gave consent to receive commercial email. Inbox placement statistics are based on performance across more than 150 mailbox providers in North America, South America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific regions.

Source: www.returnpath.com