In just a month, social network Friends Reunited – which has 20.6 million members – boosted its email deliverability from 67.1 per cent to 92.5 per cent.

In May, the company – which sends around 30 million emails each month – deployed Return Path’s suite of email deliverability monitoring tools and services to gain greater insight into the deliverability of its email newsletter, user-activity triggered emails and marketing emails.

One in 20 of Friends Reunited’s emails were ending up in its subscribers’ spam folders and more than a quarter (27 per cent) were going missing – totally undelivered, not in its subscribers’ spam folders or inboxes – a ‘friendly fire’ casualty of the ISP industry’s war on spam.

Social networks often suffer from poorer email reputations compared to companies in other sectors such as the financial services, media, retail and travel industries. Return Path’s Reputation Data network found email from social networks is marked as spam 100 per cent more often than email from other sectors.

High volumes of spam complaints are a huge driver of email deliverability failures, meaning the emails that social network subscribers actually want can be diverted to spam folders or blocked outright at ISP level.

Friends Reunited is using Return Path’s tools to monitor a range of metrics that affect its email reputation, including the percentage of emails it sends that reach the intended recipients’ inbox, fall into spam folders or go missing altogether – blocked from their subscribers at the ISP level.

Friends Reunited’s chief technical officer, Duncan Careless, said: "We deployed Return Path’s monitoring tools as part of our ongoing improvements to Friends Reunited, Genes Reunited and Friends Reunited Dating’s community functions. We want to take care that our members receive the messages that they’ve requested as part of our communities.

"Return Path’s excellent relationships with ISPs gives Friends Reunited a granular insight into our email deliverability to ISPs’ email customers, including the most popular email providers, AOL, Yahoo and Windows Live. Return Path’s campaign preview tools also enable us to make sure the emails we want to send appear correctly in a variety of email browsers.

"We can identify the characteristics of messages users may complain about, better understand why emails may be marked as spam by recipients and reduce the number of complaints we receive.

"As a social network, the deliverability of email is imperative to staying in touch with our users, growing our subscriber base, but more importantly to keep our users in contact with each other. Return Path’s deliverability monitoring suite enables us to monitor our email reputation, check the creative displays correctly in all of the most popular email browsers, make changes to email creative that might look like spam to ISP filters and identify any problems that may be affecting our deliverability."

Guy Shelton, vice-president of European operations at email deliverability and reputation services provider, Return Path, said: "Email reputations change in accordance with companies’ changing their email marketing practice so they need to ensure they keep monitoring their deliverability metrics.

"Friends Reunited has gained a deeper and more detailed understanding of its email deliverability issues by monitoring their email performance with Return Path’s tools. Our experts are now working to further boost Friends Reunited’s email reputation and get closer to its aim of 100 per cent delivery to email inboxes."