An estimated 20 to 30 percent of all legitimate permission-based emails are blocked or filtered due to firewall and spam filters. These delivery failures are rarely reported by your email delivery system. Why? Email service providers count an email delivered even when it lands in a junk mail folder or a corporate filter holding tank. Said differently, so long as the email doesn’t bounce, all email technology providers report it as being delivered. How can you make sure your emails successful reach your customers inboxes? Start incorporating several best practices such as, asking your customers to add your From Address to their address book, set-up white list and feedback loops directly with the top ISPs, acquire and remove names responsibly, and monitor your email campaigns delivery rates. Work with email deliverability experts or subscribe to specialized third-party auditing tools to address delivery effectiveness and test for basic rendering. Ask for a comprehensive report that covers content and coding issues (spam triggers), so you can get your emails properly delivered to the inbox.

Example: Pivotal Veracity conducted a six-week study across 100 mailers to determine whose emails ended up in the spam folder. They uncovered that an astonishing 54 percent of permission-based email marketers are filtered as spammers, including AOL News, Wal-Mart, IBM, the Feds and many others. For more details on how the study was conducted and findings, go to http://www.pivotalveracity.com/ and download the entire study.