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Emails failing to reach European consumers

Only one in six legitimate emails reach European consumers’ inboxes, according to Returnpath’s European Email Deliverability Benchmark Report.

The study revealed that European inbox placement rates (IPR) fell to 83.5% in 2010, compared with 85.5% for the same period the previous year. But while the percentage of emails going missing remains stable at 11.5%, more legitimate messages (5%) ended up as ‘junk’ or ‘bulk’.

Marketers found it particularly difficult to reach German customers’ inboxes. With an overall inbox delivery rate of 82.5%, Germany is 1% below the European benchmark. German ISPs marked the most email as spam. One in seven emails sent to German consumers (14.1%) ended up in a spam folder and one in 25 emails went missing (3.4%). For individual websites, web.de failed to deliver 60.4% of emails in the second half of 2010, followed by Yahoo (22.7%) and Freenet (22.1%).

The UK experienced a year-on-year decrease of nearly 5% in inbox placement, with 85.2% compared with 89.9% the previous year. More than one in seven (14.8%) legitimate marketing emails failed to reach consumers’ inboxes, while 8.6% of emails sent to UK subscribers, 8.6% went missing and 6.2% went straight to spam folders. Major UK ISPs, BT Internet and Demon posted the highest non-delivered rates for the UK at 25.6% and 24.5%, respectively. Hotmail, Yahoo, Orange and NTL had non-delivered rates of more than 10%.

More than one sixth of emails sent to French subscribers (15.2%) weren’t delivered, with 8.5% of messages blocked at the ISP level and 6.7% reaching spam folders. Yahoo, Wanadoo and Orange were the most difficult inboxes to reach with non-delivery rates of more than 17%, followed by SFR and LaPoste. Alice and Free posted the lowest non-delivery rates, blocking 9% of emails.  

Jenni Baker, London