Margaret Farmakis (pictured below) looks at false reporting in the email marketing industry.

As the first tentative green shoots of recovery struggle up from the wasteland of the recession, you’d think that email marketers across Europe were well-prepared for the broad, sunlit uplands of economic growth that we’re promised for 2010. If you did, you’d be wrong.

A recent research report from Return Path has found that European email marketers have their heads thrust firmly in the sand when it comes to the ‘deliverability’ of their messages. An astonishing two-in-five European email marketers don’t know if their messages are being successfully delivered to subscribers’ inboxes. What’s more, those who are aware of delivery failures don’t have access to the detailed metrics they need to get their messages into the inbox and read.

The implications for the industry are profound and deeply worrying. Email should be one of the most cost-effective marketing channels, which explains why this medium has stayed robust throughout the current period of economic malaise. But email is only cost-effective if it’s received – and read. Figures show that one-in-five legitimate, permission-based emails never even reach the inbox.

That’s an unacceptably high rate in any financial climate; in the current economy, such wastage cripples the effectiveness of an email marketing campaign. Emails that end up in the spam folder – or that are blocked by Internet Services Providers (ISPs) simply won’t be converted into the sales that brands so desperately need.

Yet marketers cannot begin to address deliverability issues until they know the scale of the problem that they face. That’s why the report’s findings are such a cause for alarm.

Marketers are emailing in the dark

The survey – which polled in-house marketing executives at organisations across Europe – found that almost 40 per cent of respondents thought if an email is reported as sent, or hasn’t ‘bounced’, then it has been successfully delivered. But bounces aren’t the only factor that email marketers must consider. In their fight against spam, ISPs – the Internet ‘postmen’ for email messages – are responsible for analysing and sorting the emails that get sent over their networks. Email that looks like spam will be treated as spam – it’ll be diverted into recipients’ bulk folders, or may even be blocked altogether. Messages treated in this way won’t appear as bounces, so subtracting bounces from the total messages sent won’t give an accurate impression of how many emails reached the inbox.

It may be tempting to lay the blame at the door of marketers themselves, but in many cases the problem stems from the deliverability reports that they are provided by their Email Services Providers (ESPs). Most email broadcasting systems report that a message is delivered if it doesn’t bounce. This is grossly misleading, and can give marketers the impression that they’re achieving a deliverability rate of 95 per cent or more. Given the 20 per cent failure rate for all commercial email, marketers who are getting blithely optimistic deliverability metrics need to question their accuracy.

The problem is some ESPs are reporting messages as ‘delivered’ merely if they’ve been passed to the Internet. If the message gets blocked by an Internet Service Provider (ISP), it is not recorded in this incorrect ‘delivered’ statistic. So, in many cases, the proportion of messages getting into subscribers’ inboxes, read and acted upon is much lower than reported, leading to a wildly optimistic impression of a campaign’s effectiveness. Without accurate metrics, marketers are emailing in the dark.

It is therefore crucial for marketers to demand metrics from their ISPs that show the percentage of email that goes to ‘inbox’, ‘junk/bulk’ and ‘missing’. If you have false information on email deliverability it skews all of your other metrics, such as click-through and conversion rates.

Deliverability is in marketers’ own hands

While Return Path’s report found that marketers were in the dark on deliverability, it also turned the spotlight on another common misconception – that ESPs are solely responsible for getting emails into the inbox. In fact, while ESPs do have a small amount of influence, it’s marketers themselves who control the major factors that affect deliverability. And the good news is it’s easy for marketers to optimise email deliverability by following simple best practice guidelines.

First of all, marketers need to know if emails are getting delivered to subscribers’ inboxes. To do this, they must demand accurate and comprehensive deliverability metrics from their ESPs or from an objective third party. These metrics should include complaint rates, unknown user rates, spam trap hits and server configuration – all of which affect deliverability rates. Deliverability is a shared responsibility and email services providers can be a big help by providing timely, actionable campaign performance reports based on a seedlist system – where known ‘good’ email addresses are included in subscriber databases, enabling ESPs to monitor whether these addresses actually receive the marketer’s emails.

Once marketers have a true picture of deliverability rates, they can concentrate on improving their email reputation – a metric that determines how their emails are seen and sorted by ISPs. Emailers with a bad reputation – for example, who generate high volumes of spam complaints – are much less likely to have their messages delivered to the inbox. A huge part of optimising email reputation is by ensuring an excellent experience for subscribers. They’ve asked to receive marketing messages, so the onus is on marketers to give subscribers messages which are relevant and targeted and which arrive at suitable intervals – thus minimising the number of subscribers who mark messages as spam.

Finally, it is vital to get the basics right, including rigorous list hygiene practices and ensuring that all legal obligations – such as obtaining permission, removing opt-outs and following lawful data collection practices – are met.

There is so much to recommend email as an effective and results-driven marketing channel, not least the fact that it can be so cost-effective, thereby producing a high return on investment. Yet, if marketers’ messages aren’t being delivered to the inbox, it’s not just a waste of time, effort and resources – ongoing deliverability failures will continue to degrade the marketer’s reputation, leading to even more emails ending up in the spam folder, or being blocked altogether.

It’s time for marketers across Europe to pull their heads out of the sand and take a proper look at how effectively their email campaigns are reaching subscribers. If they don’t, those green shoots of recovery . . . those future customers and sales . . . will be left rotting on the vine.

Margaret Farmakis is senior director, response consulting, Return Path.