Nearly 25% of US email marketing messages were not delivered to recipients’ inboxes on Cyber Monday, according to an analysis by deliverability specialists Pivotal Veracity.
“Cyber Monday has become a veritable trench warfare of offers, specials and hype in consumers’ email inboxes,” says Deirdre Baird, president and CEO of Pivotal Veracity. “As delivery queues get packed with messages, ISP spam filters go on high alert and many marketers end up with lower inbox delivery rates.”
The data for Pivotal Veracity’s Black Friday & Cyber Monday 2009 Deliverability report is culled from the company’s eDelivery Tracker Solution. This maintains email addresses at hundreds of leading ISPs/email providers around the world, with default spam-filtering settings left intact. eDelivery Tracker customers send campaigns to these ‘seed accounts’ and the system is set up to automatically log in to each account to identify whether the message was received, sent to the spam folder or blocked.
In all, Pivotal Veracity found, only 76.2% of emails sent on Cyber Monday made it to the recipient’s inbox.
“The temptation to mail every Tom, Dick and Harry on your list can be hard for marketers to resist — especially with the holiday shopping season now in full swing,” Baird explains. “But sending out a last minute offer to someone who hasn’t purchased anything from you in the last 12 months is going to shoot you in the foot, and could even have longer term consequences for your reputation in an environment where ISPs are increasingly looking for signs of positive user engagement in deciding whether or not to deliver your mail.”
