With over 3.8 billion users, and an average conversion rate of over 6% for promotional email messages, email remains one of the highest performing digital marketing channels out there. But if your own email deliverability rates aren’t comparable to average email deliverability benchmarks, you’re leaving results on the table.
Email Deliverability
One of the most important considerations that professional email marketers must be aware of is the question of email deliverability. Mailbox providers are under increasing pressure to deliver an exceptional quality of service to their customers.
This includes placing restrictions and filters as to which emails are allowed to pass through the gate and into user’s inboxes. If you get this wrong, or simply fail to include this as a metric in your reports, you could find yourself missing out on potential revenue.
Simply put, emails that don’t pass the gate are not landing in the spam folder — they simply don’t make it to the user’s account, period.
Many email marketers aren’t aware of this fact, as it’s not included in their email service provider’s (ESP) report. If this metric isn’t in your report, you could be losing out on ROI and on making a connection with your list.
Email deliverability benchmarks are useful for providing critical data on what percentage of your emails are reaching the inbox, and the percentage of emails that went missing or were blocked by the mailbox provider.
Relevant Email Deliverability Benchmarks?
To gain a better understanding of how this works in practice, let’s take a look at the 2020 Email Delivery Benchmark Report from Validity.
This report gives detailed statistics on deliverability benchmarks for over 30 different countries, including the average global inbox placement. It draws its data from an analysis of the performance of over 2 billion email messages sent in 2019 from thousands of senders in a wide range of industries.
Global Deliverability Benchmarks
The global email inbox placement was 83% in 2019. This figure was down two percentage points from the previous year.
Of the missing 17%, 7% of this was labelled as spam (an increase of 1% on the previous year), while the missing rate stayed the same at 10%.
North America Deliverability Benchmarks
The year to date average for North America shows the following results:
- Inbox placement rate: 83%
- Spam placement rate: 7%
- Missing rate: 10%
This is in line with the global average, with a +1% change year-on-year.
Asia Deliverability Benchmarks
The stats for Asia:
- Inbox placement rate: 84%
- Spam placement rate: 3%
- Missing rate: 13%
While the inbox placement is about the same as the global average, the spam rate is significantly lower. This is offset by the higher missing rate, and the year-on-year change for the same stats is +2%.
Europe Deliverability Benchmarks
And the email deliverability stats for Europe:
- Inbox placement rate: 84%
- Spam placement rate: 7%
- Missing rate: 10%
This is again in line with the global average, but has the highest year-on-year change at +3%.
How to Improve Your Email Deliverability
Now that you have a clearer understanding of the importance of email deliverability and the global average for the key stats, it’s time to find out how to make sure your emails are being read and what you can do to improve your own email deliverability.
1. Review Your Performance
If you don’t already know the performance stats for your inbox placement rates, spam rates and missing rate, it’s time to find out. You can use tools on Validity or a seed email database to gather data on your own campaigns. What’s important to know is if your email arrived, and if so did it make it to the inbox as opposed to the spam folder? If the answer is no, you’ll need to review your strategy and make some changes.
2. Spring Clean Your Email List
This is something that, as a rule, you ought to be doing already. Spam complaints, honey traps, and unengaged subscribers can all contribute to a lower trust score among email providers and in some cases trigger their block filter. Staying on top of this by carrying out regular list maintenance can help to keep things on track. This includes ensuring that you’re using a two-step sign-up process.
3. Maintain Your Sender Reputation
A poor sender reputation is one of the key factors contributing to emails not being reaching the inbox. Not only can this eat away at your ROI but a poor sender reputation can be difficult to recover from. Use online tools to check your sender score and stay on the right side of the mailbox providers’ spam filters. For Gmail, we recommend using the free dashboard, Google Postmaster Tools.
4. Have You Been Blacklisted?
It’s very possible to be on an email blacklist and not know about it. This will almost certainly impact your email deliverability score. Check with a blacklist lookup service to make sure your domain is not affected, and if you do discover your IP on a list, follow the list maintainer’s instructions to remove yourself from it.
Maintain High Email Deliverability
Follow these simple steps to maintain your sender reputation, and this will help to ensure that your emails continue to land in your subscriber’s inbox, where they belong, leading to a very healthy email deliverability rate.
