Should We Bother to Track Email Delivery Rates?

According to Bizreport, over 20% of wanted emails go undelivered. Tracking email delivery rates is the key to understanding where your company's emails are ending up, and how to ensure deliverability and therefore increase overall efficiency.

This post will highlight why tracking is important as well as a few key things that email professionals should be keeping an eye on. But first, take a look at a few stats from a 2013 Email Intelligence Report, exposing the overall decline of email placement on a global scale:

1.      IPR’s, or Inbox Placement Rates, have declined globally by 4% since 2012, according to a study of nearly 1 trillion marketing messages sent.

2.      Out of the near trillion emails sent, 22% of them were either blocked, missing, or sent straight to a spam folder.

3.      In the Asia-Pacific region specifically, IPR’s declined by 64%.

4.      In Europe, 20% of email marketing messages never made it to subscriber’s inboxes.

5.      In South America, 40% of emails sent by Brazilian marketers were blocked or sent to spam folders.

6.      Only 14% of marketing messages sent to American subscribers didn’t make it to an inbox.

7.      Gmail inboxes are the most difficult to reach from most countries – US senders placed 88% of their messages in these provider’s inboxes compared to 93% in AOL.

So how does tracking email deliverability help your company with email marketing?

Tracking is a vital tool to understanding how your customers are engaging with your emails. Are you emails ending up in spam folders or not being delivered altogether? Or if they are delivered, are subscribers opening your message?

In the email world, there are ISP’s set up to lure spammers and trap them. If you find your emails are ending up in the spam folder, tweak their format and avoid using showy text and spam-like tactics (such as sending too much, too often) to see if that’s where the issue lies.

Tracking helps you keep a quality email-marketing list of customers with high levels of engagement. Sometimes, subscribers who have only clicked on an email once will report you as a spammer, causing your emails to be blacklisted elsewhere if you continuing sending emails to them.

Track the engagement levels of your customers and remove users from your list who have never clicker or have only clicked once on your emails. Constantly keep refreshing that list.

Misplaced emails are missed opportunities to engage with your customer and foster good business relationships. Tell us about your experience with email marketing and cultivating good placement rates in the comment section below.