According to a Return Path’s latest Deliverability Benchmark Report, of the 21% of email that is not delivered to the inbox, only 3.3% is sent to a “junk mail” folder and 17.4% is not delivered at all – it just vanishes!
Return Path did not state where they believe the email to be, but we suspect that it is floating in deep space, possibly captured in the crystal prison of the three Krypton prisoners from Superman.
Some other notable points from the study:
- It is easier to deliver to US ISPs than Canadian ISPs. Inbox placements of mail sent to US ISPs was 82% in contrast to 75% sent to Canadian ISPs.
- B2B delivery rates are less than that of B2C email 72% vs 79%. This is in strong opposition to what is normally believed to be the case. Accounting for this is the fact that businesses are being protected by ever advancing systems like Postini, Synamtec and MessageLabs.
- In the US, Gmail is the hardest ISP to penetrate and Cox is the easiest.
- In Canada, Primus.ca was the hardest ISP to penetrate and Telus was the easiest.
I encourage you to download the full study, which is brief but very informative, and includes colorful charts and graphs:
