Which Department Stores Have Optimized Their Email Program

By Tom Sather

Email marketing is a very competitive field. Not only is your brand vying against direct competitors as well as other retailers for attention, you must also prove to mailbox providers that your content is desired by subscribers and should be placed in the inbox. To find out which brands are excelling in both inbox placement and subscriber engagement, Return Path compared the email programs of the top department stores and identified which brands stand out above the rest.

For our study, we compared six department store brands, analyzing their engagement metrics for 52 weeks beginning in July 2013. The metrics we used to compare each brand's email programs were inbox placement rate (IPR); delivered-to-spam rate; read rate; deleted without reading; spam complaints or "This Is Spam" (TIS); rescues from the spam folder or "This Is Not Spam" (TINS); and Sender Score.

Brand of the Year
The award for overall winner in the department store category goes to Hudson's Bay. In a very tight race, Hudson's Bay placed highest in deliverability with an average inbox placement of 98 percent, a spam rate of 2 percent, and a sender score of 94. Of those messages that were sent to the spam folder, 14 percent were rescued from customers pressing the TINS button. TINS is a highly trusted engagement metric by mailbox providers. A high TINS rate shows mailbox providers that subscribers notice that brand is missing from their inbox and will actively go to the spam folder to rescue their email.

Holiday Cheerleader
Focusing just on the five weeks of holiday shopping, Kohl's managed to overtake Hudson's Bay as the lead department store. Over the holidays, Kohl's earned an average IPR of 98.7 percent and a spam rate of 1.3 percent. Kohl's not only received the lowest spam complaint rate over the holiday season, it maintained its lead in low complaints throughout the year with a yearly average TIS of 0.02 percent and an even lower holiday complaint rate of 0.013 percent.

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Tom Sather Author's page Tom Sather is Return Path’s senior director of email research. Tom uses his knowledge of ISPs, spam filters and deliverability rules to advise marketers on how to get their email delivered to the inbox. He began his Return Path career as an email deliverability consultant working with top-brand clients like eBay, MySpace, IBM and Twitter. Tom’s previous experience includes roles with email service provider Experian and on the abuse desks for AOL, Bellsouth, AT&T and GTE.

Best of the Best: Which Department Stores Have Optimized Their Email Programs