Imagine the conversation around the weekly marketing meeting. The Boss arrives. The email team goes first:

• "We saw some erratic results on response and revenues this week. I really don't know why, but we think that Yahoo! is blocking some of our messages (I never got it in my personal account)–and that represents about 30% of our total subscriber base, so it could be significant."


• "I know that a bunch of our messages get blocked by the spam filters (the industry average is 20% get blocked), but our service provider reports that we have a 95% 'delivered' rate. I know that sounds incongruent, but I'm not sure what to do about it."

Hear anything familiar? Find that marketing is blaming IT or the email service provider (ESP) for this opaque view? The Boss getting agitated that reports that are not supported by intelligent data?
No wonder. In email marketing, we seem to tolerate a level of mystery that would not be acceptable in any other channel. There is no reason to do so.
Email works so well–lots of revenues from a very low investment. Yet, many email marketers could be earning higher revenue–adding up to hundreds of thousands of dollars a year–and using better data to make more reliable forecasts. In this tight economy–or any economy!–It's foolish to leave such revenue on the table. The technology and data is within easy grasp.
According to a recent survey of European email marketers by email performance company Return Path (full disclosure: I work for Return Path), the majority of marketers (61%) acknowledge that some email marketing gets blocked by the spam filters, but that they generally don't know how much or why. In fact, our Return Path data suggests that about 20% of marketing messages never reach the inbox and so can't earn a response. Even if you have permission, some of your messages are getting blocked. That means you lose up to 20% of your revenue opportunity every time you mail. Ouch!
Feeling frustrated? You are not alone. Two in five marketers in the Europe survey don't know if their emails are being delivered to the inbox. They just don't see that data or don't understand the reports they have. Even worse, 15% think "It Doesn't Matter." Which means they don't know what they don't know. I suspect marketers in North America have the same questions.
The only way to correct it is to actively monitor and manage your true inbox placement rate: You must know how many messages actually get past the spam filters, reach the inbox and earn a response. It's not a technical challenge–the data is readily available. It's a knowledge gap.
Most email broadcast providers (your ESP or MTA vendor or internal system) report something called, "delivered." This is a good number to track–it's typically the number of messages that didn't bounce due to an unknown or ill formatted address. A good non-bounce rate is somewhere between 95% and 99%. (If yours is lower, you are either not processing bounces correctly or your data sources are weak.)
That's only one small part of the picture, however. There is another big reason why email messages don't reach the intended inbox: The spam filters. There are filters at every point of the email pathway, especially at the ISPs like Yahoo!, Orange and T-Online or at the corporate exchange, and at the email client on the desktop (e.g.: Outlook or Thunderbird or Gmail).
Strange that of the two major sources of missing email, one is small and widely reported (your bounce rate), the other is quite significant (your inbox placement rate) and largely hidden from marketers. Why do we stand for this? I urge you to quickly get out of the dark and track this data now.
It may be easier than you think! Just ask your broadcast vendor to provide visibility into your inbox placement at the campaign and ISP level–so you will know which message types (newsletters vs. promotions) and which ISPs (Yahoo!, Hotmail, Orange or T-Online) are giving you the most trouble. When you have that information, you can start to apply smarter segmentation, frequency and content strategies to correct it.
Many ESPs already track this data at the aggregate level. They can do so by "seeding" most of the email campaigns, and watching to see if the seed accounts reach the inbox, get filtered to the junk folder or just go missing. The performance of the seed accounts is a reliable proxy for inbox placement of the entire file.
Once you have the data, you can quickly use it to increase inbox placement and boost revenues. You will ferret out the root causes of deliverability failure, which typically include high complaints (subscribers clicking the Report Spam button), too high frequency, lack of targeting or relevancy, a poor infrastructure or lack of authentication (a good ESP will handle these last two) and to a smaller extend the HTML/content construction.
Do not abdicate responsibility. Your ESP cannot completely control your inbox deliverability. The marketer controls the messaging strategy, frequency and targeting. The best results come when IT, marketing and the ESP work together on list management, timing, segmentation and content to create campaigns that your subscriber will welcome and value. The benefits are immediate: Your subscriber response will increase along with your inbox placement.
There is no reason to email in the dark. Get the full Return Path study and talk to your ESP or deliverability specialist to correct that 20% lost revenue today. The Boss will be glad you did– and those weekly update meetings can focus again on higher revenues, stronger strategy and full program optimization.