Spam Lists = Kiss of Death
According to a 2010 study by Return Path, achieving strong inbox placement remains a challenge in the B2B sector with a delivered rate of just 75%.
Delivered/Delivery rate is a common statistic used among marketers and email service providers (ESP). However, the term can be quite deceiving, since it doesn’t tell you what was really delivered to the inbox. Delivery rate refers to the amount of emails sent minus bounces/undeliverables. Delivery rate does not take into account the fact that your email could have likely ended up in a “spam” or “junk” folder.
If users can access the folder, they are still unlikely to see and read your company’s email. Over half of email subscribers are comfortable letting their ISP decide what spam is for them rather than reviewing all of their email and deciding for themselves. (Source: MarketingSherpa. “Email Marketing Benchmark Guide.” 2008.)
In addition to your email being ignored, spam folders make it challenging for marketers to properly determine if their emails reach the inbox or not. This further undermines other statistics like open rate. Open rate is the amount of tracked opened emails divided by the delivery rate. Again, this statistic has a false assumption that all non-bounced emails are being delivered to the inbox. Therefore, open rates skew our perceptions. They make it hard to gauge the effectiveness of email campaigns.
You simply cannot send an email and hope that it reaches the intended person’s inbox. If you are complacent with the prospect of campaigns landing in spam folders then you’re jeopardizing your company’s email reputation.
Email reputation influences your inbox placement rate (IPR), or the likelihood that emails actually reach the inbox.
If your email is lumped into spam then you’re risking email reputation. How do you avoid this? Make sure your mailing list is clean and up-to-date. It is important to remove inactive email addresses from your mailing list. Do not send emails to inactive addresses that hurt deliverability. ISPs note abandoned email addresses that are never logged into. When companies start emailing these inactive addresses then ISPs mark them as spammers.
It is best to be proactive in increasing your email deliverability. Real-time Email Verification Software helps you instantly determine if an email address is valid and deliverable before sending a message. It will notify you of the dangerous inactive email addresses that risk your email reputation. By minimizing the chance of being flagged as a spammer and blacklisted, you will improve inbox placement rate. Email campaigns will be more successful since you’re increasing the odds a message reaches the inbox. Statistics like open rate will be more accurate as well. The end-result is the ability to properly determine ROI on your email marketing campaigns. Cloud-based email verification saves organizations time and resources spent on trying to maintain mailing lists.