Marketers Complain of Emails Being Blocked as SPAM by UK ISPs

A new study by Return Path has decried the otherwise welcome fact that commercial marketers are finding it harder and harder to push their annoying emails into your inbox. For example, 82% of commercial emails reached their intended UK recipients this year, which is down from 87% in 2014.

The worldwide figure of 79% is even less than the United Kingdom’s and is down from 83% last year (based on a representative sample of 357 million email marketing messages). Meanwhile the emails that don’t make it into your inbox are usually either sent to a SPAM folder or simply go missing (most likely blocked by the mailbox provider).

Apparently these figures represent the deliverability of “legitimate” commercial emails, with 21% of such messages now being lost to SPAM controls and related filtering across the world. Terrible news indeed *cough*.

George Bilbrey, Return Path President, said:

“The inbox is becoming harder to reach partly because mailbox providers are applying increasingly sophisticated algorithms to understand what content their users truly value.

As signals from individual subscribers play a bigger role in determining whose messages they see in their inboxes, email marketers that maintain their ability to consistently reach audiences will be distinguished by two critical, data-driven skills.

The winners will analyze subscriber engagement to develop email programs that consumers genuinely care about, and they will rely on reputation and deliverability data to see their email performance as mailbox providers see it, and take fast action to correct downward trends.”

In the eyes of this report consumers are deemed to be enthusiastically signing-up to access special deals and allegedly interesting content, which is what they classify as legitimate commercial email. But in the real-world the situation is often rather more complicated.

Most UK internet users hate marketing emails, including many supposedly legitimate messages, which often surface even after you’ve clicked the “Do not send me any offers!” option. Meanwhile some companies may also share their contacts database with third-party marketing firms, often without your clear and express consent, which only fuels the problem.

In fairness there is a legitimate argument against overly aggressive spam filters, which can also incorrectly erase personal email between individuals, although most ISPs give you some control over the filtering rules. Otherwise we rather suspect that very few will be unhappy at the news that less marketing email is getting through to inboxes.