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.