Delivery challenges increasing

Return Path published their most recent Global Deliverability report this morning. (Get the Report) This shows that inbox placement of mail has decreased 6% in the second half of 2011. This decrease is the largest decrease Return Path has seen in their years of doing this report.
To be honest, I’m not surprised at the decrease. Filters are getting more sophisticated. This means they’re not relying on simply IP reputation for inbox delivery any longer. IP reputation gets mail through the SMTP transaction, but after that mail is subject to content filters. Those content filters are getting a lot better at sorting out “wanted” from “unwanted” mail.
I’m also hearing a lot of anecdotal reports that bulk folder placements at a couple large ISPs increased in the first quarter of 2012. This is after the RP study was finished, and tells me increased bulk folder placement is more likely to be a trend and not a blip.
One of the other interesting things from the RP study is that the differences are not across all mail streams, but are concentrated in certain streams and they vary across different regions.

Delivery by mail type and region. (APAC: Australia and Asia-Pacific; CALA: Central and Latin America; EMEA: Europe, Middle East and Africa; NOAM: North America and Mexico)
Just looking at the NOAM region, we see that gaming mails have the worst inbox delivery, but most of the mail is getting through the IP filters. Placement of gaming mails in the spam folder tells me there’s a lot of content based filtering happening. For retail mail we see a different pattern. More mail is missing and less mail is filtered to the spam folder. This indicates a lot of IP based filtering, but if a mail gets past the IP filters, it’s more likely to end up in the inbox.
This chart really does demonstrate that “Best Practices” aren’t global. They’re very dependent on the type of mail and the recipient profile. In North America, too, it shows that mail people interact with regularly is getting to the inbox reasonably consistently. It’s the mail people don’t necessarily care if they get or not that’s suffering the most.
Another interesting data point is how gaming mail changes across various regions. In APAC, gaming mail is hitting the inbox 91% of the time. That may be a consequence of the number of people in Asia employed full time to play games (gold farming) and their interest in receiving mail about work.
Overall, this report tells us that delivery is only getting harder and more complex. Mail isn’t going to the inbox as much as it used to, and that means senders are going to have to keep adapting to recipients wants and needs.

Related Posts

Is your mail being bulk foldered?

Daisy at Signup.to posted a list of 11 things to do when mail is going to the bulk folder. Her suggestions are a good start to troubleshooting and fixing persistent bulk foldering of mail.
One thing she doesn’t mention is that while bulk foldering can sometimes be the result of poor content, more often it’s the result of unengaged recipients. Think of bulk foldering this way: the ISP has some subscribers they’re pretty sure want your mail, so they’re not going to block your mail. But they’re pretty sure a lot of subscribers don’t want your mail so they’re not going to deliver it to the inbox.
The trick to getting mail moved out of the bulk folder is to get more people engaged with your email marketing. This is tough to do if they’re not actively checking their bulk folder for mail but there are some ways I’ve helped clients get mail into the inbox.

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Delivery and marketing, another view

In addition to posting some of my thoughts about how delivery and marketing have different and possible contradictory constraints, I asked folks on the Only Influencers list what they thought. They had some different perspectives, primarily being marketers. One person even welcomed me to the dark side.
The general response from the marketing side of things appeared to be that ISPs need to stop actually filtering marketing email. That would resolve the problems from the marketers perspective. I don’t necessarily think that will help. I believe if marketers had unfettered access to the inbox, most inboxes would be totally un-useable.
My thinking triggered other folks to consider delivery and marketing and what drives both. George Bilbrey, from Return Path, posted an article in Mediapost looking at why good delivery is an important part of a good marketing strategy.
George points out many marketers really do act as if delivery is separate and detrimental to good marketing.

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Return Path acquires OtherInbox

This morning Return Path announced they have acquired OtherInbox.
OtherInbox is a service that allows subscribers to create tagged email addresses and organize incoming mail. Acquiring OIB gives Return Path access to recipient behaviour that only the ISPs had previously.
According to the press release, Return Path will be using engagement data from OIB as another factor for Return Path Certification. I think this can only improve the scoring and reflect a more modern measure of wanted mail.
Congratulations to Return Path and OtherInbox.

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