1 out of 6 Commercial Emails Never Reaches the Inbox

by Roland Pokornyik

source: Return Path

When I came across this report from Return Path, I was quite surprised about the results. I could never imagine that roughly 17% of our messages simply won’t arrive to our subscribers. I can still hardly believe it, since according to Mailchimp, our delivery rate is over 99% for our newsletters.

I can easily imagine that 6% goes to SPAM, since the soul of the different SPAM filters seems to be extremely complicated, and you may even get banned from the inbox of your double opt-in subscribers for very strange reasons, or even for “no” reason.

But what about the remaining 11%? These emails tend to miss the inbox due to the complexity of the mailbox providers’ decision making processes. Best practices, which worked before, are no longer enough to ensure inbox placement.

How can you improve your inbox placement?

  • Keep your email list as clean as possible! Remove invalid email addresses and those which hard bounce on a monthly basis at least.
  • Sender reputation really matters! Use Senderscore to check it.
  • Your email history counts as well. The more times you ended up in SPAM with your emails, the more likely it is to get there again.
  • Write really engaging emails, which get opened and clicked. If you over perform “benchmarks” and produce quality content, you are more likely to get to the inbox.
  • You can also work with dedicated deliverability solutions like Return Path, 250ok, Sendersuite or others.