In a recent update to their In the Know blog the Return Path team notes that more and more commercial emails have gone missing in Europe. No less than one in six does not arrive in the inbox according to the research done, while the country where delivery of emails turns out to be the hardest is France: just over 84% actually gets delivered. In general just 82,2% gets delivered, which is a decrease of 3% from last years 85,4%.
One of the main reasons for the worsening delivery rate noted in the article is the fact that ISPs are ramping up their security and spam filters to battle all the spam coming in, which in turn also affects legitimate email. Guy Shelton points out another reason for the lower delivery rate:
Legitimate marketing emails often get caught in spam filters because customers flag email messages as spam when they have become bored of receiving emails from a company. If a company receives too many spam reports about emails requested by their customers then all the emails they send will be affected.
At the end of the article it’s concluded that marketers should do more to prevent their emails not getting delivered: following best practices is one of the most important parts, but also getting to know from the ESPs what actually gets delivered to the inbox is noted as an important metric.
