Some 81% of all permission-based commercial emails worldwide were delivered straight to recipients' inboxes in the first half of 2011, while the balance of messages (19%) either fell prey to spam or junk folders (7%) or simply went missing (blocked by ISP-level filtering) (12%), according to a report from Return Path:
Below, other findings from ReturnPath's 1H11 Global Email Deliverability Benchmark Report.
Email performance in North America was stronger, recording an 86.01% inbox placement rate (IPR) for permission-based commercial emails in 1H11, with the remaining 14% of email messages not reaching the inbox, either marked as junk (5.62%) or going missing (8.35%).
Canada recorded a relatively higher rate (12.2%) of email going missing, whereas the US recorded a higher percentage of email delivered to spam boxes (7.56%).
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Business email marketers also faced deliverability issues: 80% of all permission-based messages reached business inboxes in 1H11 (managing to penetrate enterprise-level filtering systems such as Postini, Symantec, and MessageLabs).
However, that percentage is a 5% improvement over results reported in 2009, when just 75.2% of email messages made it to business inboxes.
About the data: Findings are based on email data from 149 ISPs (Internet service providers) worldwide (North America, Central and Latin America, Europe, Asia and the Asia-Pacific territories) and 600,000 email campaigns conducted from January to June, 2011.
