On average, one in six messages is not reaching the inbox.
Globally, the average inbox placement rate was 83% in 2019—meaning one out of every six messages failed to reach the inbox. “Global deliverability saw a slight decline of two percentage points from the 2018 average of 85%,” says the 2020 Email Deliverability Benchmark study done by Validity. The study analyzed the performance of over 2 billion email messages sent in 2019 from thousands of senders in over a dozen industries to see how many emails were delivered to the inbox, spam, or blocked altogether.
The state of deliverability
Deliverability is not static. Shifts in the industry, adjustments to spam filtering algorithms, and changes in consumer preferences impact inbox placement for not only one brand, but for the entire industry. One such big shift has been the focus on data privacy.
To get better understanding deliverability is defined as a sender's ability to be delivered to the inbox. Your email program performance and ROI relies on your ability to reach the inbox. Often, marketers rely on their delivered rate shown in their email marketing dashboards provided by their email service provider (ESP) to judge the performance of their deliverability.
However, the term “delivered” can be misleading. Email, once sent, can be delivered to many different places inside a mailbox provider system. According to the study delivered rate only measures the amount of email that was accepted and rejected by the mailbox provider due to things like invalid addresses and blacklistings. “What your delivered rate doesn’t tell you is if those messages landed in the inbox, the spam folder, or went missing.”
To find out if your messages arrived in the inbox, you need to look at your inbox placement rate. Your inbox placement rate is a more accurate and reliable way to measure deliverability and the success of an email campaign since it measures how many emails were delivered to the inbox versus email delivered to the spam folder in addition to messages rejected or blocked.
For this study Validity used seed data to track and measure how email is delivered around the world. Seed addresses are one of the original methods used to measure inbox placement.
Marketers sending to mailboxes in the Asia-Pacific region had an average inbox placement rate of 84% in 2019. Messages in Japan saw the highest inbox placement of all countries studied at 97%. Emails to South Korean inboxes were successfully delivered only 74% of the time, while in India only 69% of emails reached subscribers’ inboxes.
India has the highest percentage of missing rate (30%) - i.e. the percentage of mail that did not arrive in the inbox or spam folder but has been deferred for blocked by the mailbox provider.
Nonprofits losing over 20% of email revenue due to spam filters.
In 2018, the average email spam rate across the nonprofit sector was 20.18%—down from its peak last year at 24.16%, but still high above pre-2016 levels (the average spam rate was at 7.03% in 2015). Despite this slight improvement from 2017, spam filters still cost nonprofits a significant amount in lost revenue informed the 2019 Email Deliverability Report by Everyaction.
20.18% of emails were delivered to spam in 2018. While most conversations about email marketing metrics revolve around list sizes, open rates, and clicks, it’s clear that ignoring the impact of deliverability is a costly oversight.
In the 2019 year’s study of 55 organizations, EveryAction found that, on average, 20.18% of emails were delivered to spam folders monthly in 2018. March saw the highest spam rate (24.21%) and July, the lowest (15.20%), a trendline somewhat similar to the previous year.
Getting to the inbox
According to the Validity: “While reaching the inbox isn’t an easy matter, there are a few simple steps that can increase the chances your messages will pass through filters and reach your subscribers.”
Track your inbox placement: Having access to and monitoring your inbox placement rate will allow you to more accurately judge the health of your program. You will know how many messages arrive in your subscribers’ inbox and not in the spam folder or otherwise.
Reputation: Check your sender’s reputation before you send a new campaign to make sure mailbox providers will evaluate your messages favorably, improving your ability to reach the inbox.
Keep your list clean: Having an effective and small list is better than a huge list that is inactive and brings down your reputation. Keeping a subscriber list free from spam traps, unknown users, and inactive subscribers will help boost your reputation and your ability to reach the inbox.
According to Everyaction: Email service providers are constantly updating their algorithms in order to better filter unwanted content and provide users with only relevant emails. So keep these things in mind:
Opt-in and Confirm: Not only should you be explicitly asking individuals to opt-in to your email list. By opting-in addresses and confirming them, you ensure the person on the other end absolutely wants to hear from you and will be an engaged subscriber. But this is largely ignored.
Segmenting and personalised content: Rather than sending blast content to your entire list, segment your list into smaller universes based on the specific types of appeals the are likely to respond to and send content that is likely to resonate with each affinity group.
Trigger Emails: Automated email series allow an organization to communicate with a supporter based on various triggers, ensuring that no one falls through the cracks when it comes to receiving timely communication. Integrate your trigger emails according to the Subscriber and Donor user journey.
Focus on bounces: Explore why bounces are occurring, and what you can do to remedy them. If they happen more than 2 or 3 times, remove them. Repeated bounces can cause alarm bells to ring with email service providers. Similarly, if an email address has been inactive for more than a year, remove it from your list.
One of the primary findings from the report 2020 Nonprofit Communications Trends report was the ignoring of email list best practices. While there isn’t a hard and fast rule at this time, most email service providers consider a subscriber engaged if they have opened at least one email in the last 3-6 months.
“A little over half of the nonprofits are implementing email re-engagement campaigns, although they are often waiting too long to do them. Only 4% of nonprofits cut back sending after three months of no engagement, with another 5% cutting back at six months of no engagement. Another 13% cut back at somewhere between one to three years.”
Definitely these practices by nonprofits only increase the dire state of email deliverability in 2020.