Retailers Battle Worldwide Declines in Email Deliverability

By Tom Sather

The deliverability landscape is changing, and it’s only getting harder to reach your subscribers’ inboxes. For years, marketers have optimized their strategies to create impactful campaigns that reach a large audience. Historically, their hard work developing sophisticated programs has resulted in an upward trend of inbox placement rates worldwide. However, for the first time in years, that trend is on the decline. Only four in five commercial messages make it to the inbox across the globe.

A recent Return Path study revealed that global inbox placement rate (IPR) dropped 4 percent year-over-year, settling at a 79 percent worldwide IPR. Messages that don’t make it to the inbox are either sent to spam or not delivered at all.

Deliverability took an even bigger hit in the U.S., which usually achieves high inbox placement rates. Dropping 11 percent over the past year, U.S. senders saw nearly one in four messages sent to spam or go missing. Historically, poor sender reputation has been a major cause of spam filtering, but the decline across the globe suggests mailbox providers are looking at other, more individualized signals (e.g., subscriber engagement) to determine which messages to place in the inbox.

Maybe that’s why apparel, retail, food and beverage, and health and beauty brands increased their IPR in a time of global decline. Maintaining strong customer relationships is a critical component to their success, so their highly developed expertise at connecting with subscribers may be the reason why their messages made it into more inboxes this year. But even with an overall IPR of 90 percent, all of these retailers are still missing out on 10 percent of potential email performance.

As the volume of commercial email traffic soars and spam tactics evolve, getting past spam filters will become even more difficult. So, how can you combat the spam filter and secure your position in the inbox?

Build and maintain a strong sender reputation by developing email programs your subscribers care about. Monitor your reputation and engagement data to understand how mailbox providers view your campaigns. Keeping a close eye on metrics like read rates, deleted-without-reading rates, and complaint rates will help you immediately see and correct downward trends and catch small issues before they turn into big problems.
As signals from individual subscribers begin playing a bigger role in spam filtering, be sure you’re creating campaigns that are valuable to particular segments of your audience. Don’t overlook the structure of your program, either. You can analyze engagement data and conduct testing to understand the frequency, send times and cadence that your subscribers prefer.

Tom Sather is the senior director of research at Return Path, an email marketing solution that helps to improve your deliverability and return on investment.

1 Comment

View Comments

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.