Finally! Deliverability statistics for France, Germany and the UK!

My employer Return Path recently released their Global Email Deliverability Benchmark Report that includes the Inbox Placement Rates for not only US, Canada, Asia but also for some of the major European markets France, Germany and the UK.

The benchmark shows that the average Inbox Placement Rate for H2 2009 (that’s the second half of last year) in the United Kingdom is about 89%, in France 88% and in Germany 85%. Knowing the average Inbox Placement Rate within your market gives you a pretty good idea on how much revenue you are potentially loosing on average, its simple: no email in the inbox, no open, no clicks and no conversion. But I hear you ask, how do I find out out how much revenue I am losing based on my programme or database instead of only the average?

Below I share with you the “Non-delivery Rates by ISP” within each market:

France		United Kingdom		Germany
ISP	Non-delivery	ISP	Non-delivery	ISP	Non-delivery
SFR	15,8%	Demon	24,7%	Web.de	62,2%
AOL	14,4%	BT Internet	21,8%	AOL	14,5%
Yahoo!	13,5%	AOL	14,3%	Yahoo!	13,3%
La Poste	13,5%	Yahoo!	12,3%	Freenet	11,7%
Orange	13,3%	Orange	12,2%	GMX	6,3%
Wanadoo	12,9%	Hotmail	11,2%	T-Online	5,1%
Hotmail	11,6%	Tesco	7,5%	Online Home	3,5%
Neuf	11,3%	NTL World	6,8%	Arcor	2,8%
Free	6,3%	Talk Talk	3,6%
Alice	5,9%	Pipex	3,3%
		Smartmail	2,0%
		Tiscali	1,8%

These statistics are not only unique as we never really had any statistics to this extent, they are also extremely valuable to any marketer that wants to calculate their *real* Non-delivery Rate based on the domain distribution within their database.

The Non-delivery Rates by ISP allows you, the marketer to compare your database to the percentages of the benchmark by ISP.

For example, in the table below I added the number of emails from a database and calculated the number of emails non-delivered per ISP.

ISP	Non-delivery Rate	N° of emails	N° emails non-delivered
SFR	15,8%	25 000	3 950
AOL	14,4%	10 000	1 440
Yahoo!	13,5%	20 000	2 700
La Poste	13,5%	5 000	675
Orange	13,3%	10 000	1 330
Wanadoo	12,9%	5 000	645
Hotmail	11,6%	55 000	6 380
Neuf	11,3%	5 000	565
Free	6,3%	5 000	315
Alice	5,9%	5 000	295

The average Non-delivery rate for France is 11.9%, the total list size is 145 000 emails and the number of emails non-delivered ended at 18 295. Dividing this number with the total list size shows that the actual Non-delivered rate equals 12.6% which is 0.7% higher than the average.

Interesting? I will let you do your own calculations here but to me it is very clear that there are significant revenue opportunities being left on the table. For all senders (marketers) moving the needle, to increase inbox placement rates will increase the ROI of the entire email marketing programme.

How Inbox Placement Rate (IPR) affects your ROI

Your open rate, click-through rate, bounce rate, unsubscribe rate and conversion rate are all key metrics that you can use to measure the success of your email campaigns and your ROI. But what if I told you that there is a new metric available to you that will greatly affect the way that your ROI is calculated? It’s called the “Inbox Placement Rate”.

Before diving into what drives the calculations, let’s take a look at some of the terms used today that are often misunderstood or applied incorrectly, the deliverability rate, delivered rate and accepted rate.

Deliverability rate
The term deliverability is very confusing with many people bandying around different definitions, amongst the confusion the term is even less accurate when one wants to know which mail actually gets delivered to the inbox. In my mind the word deliverability means exactly what it says, your ability to deliver and reach your client. Deliverability has become a profession, a concept, a strategy and for most senders another burden that stands between them and the (profitable) relationship with their clients and subscribers. Because there are so many other meanings to the word it is not the best term to use when talking about the number of emails that have reach the inbox.

Delivered (or delivery) rate
Often what is meant here is a basic calculation of the number of emails that have been sent subtracting those messages that bounced. We could also say “all the emails that have been accepted” by the receiving mailserver. ESPs often use this term to tell their clients that their delivery rate is above 95%. It is somewhat misleading to call this figure a true delivered rate as not all receiving mail servers send back consistent error or bounce codes.

Accepted rate
The accepted rate is defined as any message accepted during the SMTP session (minus the mail that is blocked due to policy, blacklisting, or content). It is similar to the delivered rate above.

Inbox Placement Rate
The wordings are simple to understand and, for me it clearly states the number of emails that have been placed in the inbox by the receiving party or ISP. So how does this impact your ROI calculation? Here’s how:

Take a look at the following table:

Metric	IPR 100%	IPR 50%	IPR 25%
Emails sent	100000	100000	100000
Emails bounce	10000	10000	10000
Emails delivered	90000	90000	90000
Delivered rate %	90%	90%	90%
Emails placed in Inbox	90000	45000	22500
Inbox Placement rate %	90%	45%	22,50%
Emails placed in Junk/Bulk	0	45000	67500
Junk/Bulk Placement rate %	0%	45%	67,50%
Emails opened	20000	10000	5000
Open rate %	22,22%	11,11%	5,56%
Emails clicked	4000	2000	1000
Clickthrough rate %	4,44%	2,22%	1,11%
Conversion rate %	2%	2%	2%
Average € per Order	25 €	25 €	25 €
ROI	2 000 €	1 000 €	500 €

If, as identified by the 2nd column, the Inbox Placement Rate would be 100%, the sender would get the best result from their email campaign. However, if they had lost 50% of their IPR (3rd column), then they would correspondingly also lose 50% of your ROI. Sounds logical right?

Based on numerous studies, 20% of all permission email never reaches the recipient (or inbox). This means that, if we use the table above, a sender/marketer sending 100,000 emails could lose as much as 400 Euros on each email campaign (assuming you earn 25Euro per order – but it could be higher!).

It is for these reasons that, in addition to the usual open, clicks, bounce metrics, savvy service providers around the globe are more frequently talking to their customers (the senders) about how Inbox Placement data can give far greater visibility into actual ROI and that calculations made without access to this data are fundamentally flawed. Whilst only some service providers have the capability to do so it is my strongly held belief that very soon clients are demanding this from their service providers.

Would you pay-per-email to get delivered?

There are some updated stories floating on the net regarding Yahoo!'s Centmail: "a charitable twist on the old idea of email postage stamps." where users donate $0.01 to a charity of their choice for each email they send.

Similar schemes like Microsoft's Penny Black or Hashcash have investigated other methods of stamping the email and use CPU cycles to measure the effort of the sender. Since there are about 80,000 seconds in a day, a computational "price" of just ten seconds per message would limit a spamming computer to at most 8,000 messages daily. So spammers would have to invest heavily in hardware in order to send high volumes of spam.

Very recently, during a meeting with one of my French partners, they also asked about Centmail, what my thoughts are on this and if it would be a good investment for them? In todays economic climate (and natural catastrophes happening around the globe), giving more money to charities is a good and noble investment to make... but less profitable. Paying an additional $10 per CPM is a very high price to pay to get your emails delivered.

Personally, I am more in favor to see every email marketing company (or any company for that matter) donate a % of every sell the make to charity - wouldn't that be just fantastic!?

Paying to get delivered - if things were only that easy.
Schemes that are saying "pay us and we'll deliver" sounds like the Godfather Vito Corleone making you an offer you cannot refuse.

It is better to work on the root cause of what blocks your mail from getting delivered and work on your reputation as a sender instead of buying into a false identity.

Your clients deserve this and when you show them "respect", one day they will return you the "favor".

Would you pay-per-email to get delivered?

Google Wave the future of email marketing?

This weekend I spend 1h20 watching the video introduction of Google Wave and I was pretty impressed by what these guys are doing. While I was watching the video I was thinking about what influence this could/would have on direct marketing. If you do not have time to go through the video, let me explain what Google Wave is and what it does:

Google Wave is a new model for communication and collaboration on the web, coming later this year. Here's a preview of just some of the aspects of this new tool.

What is a wave?

A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.

A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

So how could this be used in Email Marketing?
Imagine you own a website and instead of asking visitors to subscribe to your email communications and provide you with their email address, you ask them to become part of your wave that will include offers and promotions.

You would have no more need to:

• send out email campaigns - You simple post your promotions on your website like you normally do and provide everyone access to your wave. Whether they read their waves on their mobile device, blog, social network they can see it everywhere.
  
• manage unsubscribe requests - people that no longer want to receive your communications simply "disconnect" from the wave.
• translate your email campaigns - the video show a great tool that automatically translates the language into the language of the reader.
• Keep an active mailing or "Waving" list - Everyone on the wave REALLY wants to have news from you.
  
• worry about deliverability - because the wave is hosted on a server and everyone reads it directly from the server. No more worries about spam filters, throttling issues, complaints etc...

On top of this, you may be able to analyze exactly how much new Euros or Pounds your promotions are generating because they buy directly from the links in the wave... so from your website.

If all of this is technically possible I guess that this would work if the adoption of Google Wave goes beyond Google's expectations and everyone would be using it and besides, would you provide your personal "chat id name" to just anyone?

There are no quick fixes to inbox delivery!

I recently went to Madrid to speak about Sender Score Certifed at an event held by Cabestan and had this very nice conversation with someone looking for a quick fix to solve their deliverability issues. He told me that they were unable to solve their problems in particulary with Hotmail. I decided to dive a bit deeper in their issue and asked several questions to see if I could be of any help. The outcome after only ten minutes was that they were not signed up to Hotmail's JMR, they took out Hard Bounces after 2 or even 3 times, they did not have a double-optin in place, they sometimes added email adresses from unknown sources and the list just went on and on. I told him that they should start working on each point and that it is not that strange they have deliverability problems. His answer was "yes, I know, but don't you have a quickfix for this now?". The answer to that is "no there is not!". If you want your email to be received as a "wanted" email than you must work on your reputation as a sender. Why spent valuable time and money on creating your emailing campaigns and then neglect the most important thing which is getting your emails delivered to your customers. We all know that success and a profitable ROI highly depends on customer retention and loyalty so if you want to go in the emailing business you are in it for the long run! There should be no short term solution for a long term email marketing strategy.

Getting your email into the Inbox!

Every company sending large volumes of commercial or transactional email struggles with a hidden issue: email deliverability. Aware of it or not, nearly 20 percent of email gets blocked or filtered by ISPs and corporate system administrators. Whether email is sent in-house or through an ESP, non-delivery erodes response rates and program effectiveness.

To determine how email deliverability affects your email program, there are several things you need to do:

• Understand the factors that contribute to blocking & filtering
• Monitor your program delivery to learn the extent of problems
• Uncover the root causes of your specific issues
• Ensure your technical infrastructure meets required standards
• Build relationships with ISPs to help resolve delivery