22% of marketing emails fail to reach the subscriber’s inbox: report

Just over one in five (22%) commercial emails sent globally on the first half of 2013 never made it to the subscriber’s inbox, according to a new report from Return Path.

This means that billions of messages sent with the intended recipient’s permission were either bumped into the spam folder or, more commonly, didn’t reach the inbox at all.

Furthermore, the global inbox placement rate actually declined slightly versus the first half of 2012, dropping 4% year-on-year.

Obviously on the plus side the good news is that 78% of marketing messages do reach their intended recipient.

Deliverability is one of the topics covered in our Email Marketing Census 2013. According to the responding companies (58%) clean and up-to-date lists have the biggest impact on improving deliverability, and this has increased by 4% since 2012.

By David Moth July 30th 2013 13:51

The next most cited factors are relevance of email to recipients (45%), reputation of sender (44%), and use of confirmed opt-in data (30%).

Which of the following have the biggest impact on improving the likelihood of emails reaching the inbox (i.e. deliverability)?

Looking at the responsibility for deliverability, some 84% of company respondents believe that it falls on the shoulders of the marketing team while just 28% believe it’s the responsibility of the email service provider.

In contrast, agency respondents were more likely to place responsibility with the ESP (40%) or with themselves (36%).

Whose responsibility is email deliverability?

Deliverability by industry

Return Path’s report also looks at deliverability by industry. Retailers proved to be one of the best performing sectors with an inbox placement rate of 92%, up 5% on last year’s total.

Only utilities (95%), consumer products (93%) and publishers (97%) performed better in the first half of 2013.

The report suggests that the high deliverability rate achieved by retailers reflects a consumer demand for opt-in email offers. For more information on this topic, check out our recent blog posts on how the email sign up process differs between major retailers and how different brands design their welcome emails.

Article User Experience and Usability

Five key themes for fashion ecommerce success

So here’s the bad news. It’s no longer enough for your site to be ‘usable’ and ‘intuitive’. Today’s best in breed online retailers mastered the usability thing a while back and have long moved on.

To survive in a competitive market your site must also draw customers in, provide ideas, inspiration and help all without being overly attentive and obtrusive.

Whether your site is selling high fashion or stationery, we can all learn something from the most successful online retailers. We used whatusersdo.com to find out what was working best on two big fashion retail sites: ASOS and H&M.

Here are the five key themes both have hit upon to help them to their success.

Ryanair trumps EasyJet and BA for traffic, but fails at user engagement

User experience is a key differentiator in ecommerce as if the process of buying something from a website is enjoyable and convenient then it encourages customer loyalty.

To an extent, it can even overcome the natural consumer urge to find the lowest price.

However for most consumers cost is still the most important factor when making a purchase, as evidenced by new traffic stats from Ryanair.

A study by SimilarWeb into traffic volumes for several airlines found that Ryanair consistently outperforms EasyJet and British Airways despite its obvious contempt for UX and customer service.

We written a number of posts about the shoddy UX on Ryanair’s site, including its hidden costs, irritating upselling, and lack of a mobile site, yet customers are still obviously attracted by the airline’s low prices.

Article Multichannel Marketing

Anatomy of a campaign: How charity:water raised more than $2m

In just six short weeks, it’ll be time for the September Campaign, the biggest annual fundraiser from nonprofit charity:water.

What the organization does this year to raise money remains to be seen, but it’s worth looking back more closely at its efforts in 2012, when the charity took in more than $2m ($300,000 more than its original goal) largely through digital marketing.

That shouldn’t be a surprise: charity:water founder Scott Harrison told the New York Times last year that he “absolutely” attributes the organization’s success to the web.

Article AI/Machine learning

What exactly is AI-powered commerce search and what does it mean for retailers?

We’ve seen lots of examples of new intelligent search features or conversational agents in the last six months in online retail – from Walmart, Instacart and Amazon, for example. In a recent article, I tried out some AI-powered product discovery features to see how useful they might be for shoppers. And though they each provided distinctive […]

1

Article Augmented reality

14 examples of augmented reality brand experiences

Augmented reality has surged in the headlines of late with the release of Apple’s Vision Pro headset and Meta teasing a potential rollout of AR glasses as it marks the 10-year anniversary of its VR/AR outfit, Meta Reality Labs. If augmented reality headsets and eyewear become more commonplace, brands and entertainment companies may take the […]

Article Privacy and data protection

Retailers’ guardrails for generative AI need to match up to their level of investment

A joint report from Salesforce and the Retail AI Council suggests widespread retailer investment in generative AI – but a lack of structure and guardrails to ensure it is used effectively and above all, ethically.

Article Privacy and data protection

Above all else, consumers want their data used responsibly: report

Nearly two thirds of consumers rank data security as critical to their CX expectations. They want to know their data is being looked after, especially in the hands of generative AI.

Comments

Leave a comment

You must be logged in to post a comment.