Email Deliverability Rates

Not all email marketing companies perform the same!

What is your email reputation? Until you fully understand your email reputation, it is difficult to know what you need to do to improve your email delivery rates. Are you mailing too often? Not frequently enough? Do you have a poor email infrastructure? Are your bounce rates too high? There are so many variables that affect your email deliverability that a reputation management system is a necessity to better understand the areas you need to improve that drive the biggest return.

A recent Return Path study shows that email sender reputation, and not content, is the major factor in whether your email reaches the inbox. 83% of the time, sender reputation is the cause of filtering.

All email receivers use different standards to determine what triggers filtering, but they all hinge on your email reputation. By compiling the same data for every email sender, and making it public for both senders and receivers, the playing field becomes more level. Think of it as a credit score for your email program. Everyone sees what the standards are, who is failing them, and what to do about it. In the end, a good email reputation becomes the critical factor dictating if your email reaches the inbox.

You can check your company’s email deliverability rate at Return Path, a 3rd-party rating company that offers leading email inbox monitoring tools for determining email delivery rates.

I use RatePoint because it provides customers with industry-leading deliverability. Return Path scores RatePoint’s email deliverability rates for valid email addresses in the United States between 98%-99%, and it was 99.8% when I checked on 4/5/10.