15% of B2C E-Mails Don’t Get Thru

11/02/2003

According to a study from Assurance Systems, as of Q4 2002 15% of B2C permission e-mail marketing messages are not making it into the recipients’ inboxes as intended. Assurance notes that this rises from just 12% of all B2C permission e-mails in Q3 2002.

Assurance bases its findings on over 800 e-mail campaigns sent out by its clients between October and December 2002. Assurance notes that these messages were sent across 11 major internet service providers (ISPs) representing over 60% of addresses for most major B2C customer lists. Assurance also found that Netzero yielded the highest non-delivery rate with 27%, while Yahoo! and AOL followed with non-delivery rates of 22% and 18%, respectively. Some ISPs however, like EarthLink and MSN, yielded the lowest non-delivery rates of 6% each.

To put the Assurance numbers into greater perspective in terms of volume, Forrester Research estimates that the number of marketing e-mails sent in the US will rise from 430 billion in 2002 to 549 billion this year. (segue)