Permissioned email reached only 80.1 percent of consumer inboxes in the United States and Canada during the second half of 2009, a .8 percent increase from the 79.3 percent inbox place in the first half of 2009. In the United States and Canada, 3.5 percent of those emails ended up in a junk or bulk emails folder and 16.3 percent were missing with no notification of non-delivery.

In Europe, 85.5 percent of emails reached consumers inboxes, 3.6 percent of emails were delivered to a junk or bulk folder, and 11 percent were missing. In the Asia Pacific region, inbox placement of emails was higher in the second half of 2009 with an 86.9 percent success rate.

"We spent a lot of time in 2009 discussing how inbox placement rates affect ROI, and we’re going to continue talking about this issue in 2010. Many senders believe that their email campaigns are achieving a 95% to 98% delivery rate. However, as our latest Email Deliverability Benchmark Report clearly illustrates, senders still do not have the correct data to accurately determine true ROI," said George Bilbrey, President and Co-founder, Return Path.

"If senders and ESPs count only their hard bounces as emails that failed to reach consumers, they’re not getting an accurate metric as to how many emails actually made it into subscriber inboxes. Ultimately, only emails that reach a subscriber’s inbox can be opened, clicked and converted into a loyal and active customer. Remember, sent minus bounce does not equal delivered."

The top five ISPs for senders to reach consumer inboxes in the United States ranked in order of difficulty were BellSouth, Gmail, MSN, Hotmail, and Yahoo!.

The top five ISPs for senders to reach consumer inboxes in Canada were Primus.ca, Shaw, SaskTel, MTS, and Bell. Primus.ca which uses Postini as part of its email filtering system, failed to deliver 55% of emails that marketers sent to Primus.ca users which represents a 2% increase from the first half of 2009.

The top five ISPs for senders to reach consumer inboxes in the United Kingdom ranked in order of difficulty are Demon, BT Internet, AOL, Orange, and Yahoo!.

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We’re talking about permission-based email marketing here. Return Path says:

- Such messages only reached  79.3% of inboxes during the first half of 2009.

- 3.3% of those messages go to "junk" or "bulk" folders and

- 17.4% are not delivered at all, with no hard bounce message or other notification of non-delivery.

"Many marketers aren’t even aware that one-fifth of their emails are never reaching the inbox," said George Bilbrey, President, co-founder, Return Path. "In many cases, marketers are seeing "delivered" metrics that repeatedly show a 95% to 98% delivery rate. Unfortunately, many ESPs and marketers have developed the belief that whatever emails aren’t bouncing have successfully reached the inbox. That’s just not true, as these numbers show. Marketers need to examine their current deliverability stats, and remember that hard bounces aren’t the only emails that aren’t reaching your subscribers."

Return Path says taht US deliverability rates are a little better Than Canadas, with 82% and 75% respectively. Service providers of course play significant roles in deliverability. Return Path calls Gmail the most stringent US-based service provider for permissioned marketers to reach.

Here are a few articles that provide tips for email deliverability best practices:

Email Deliverability Best Practices

Best Practices For Bulletproof E-Mail Delivery

Best Practices that Improve E-Mail Deliverability

The study found emails reached only 79.3 percent of inboxes in the United States and in Canada during the first half of 2009. With the undelivered email, 3.3 percent is routed to a junk or bulk email folder and 17.4 percent is not delivered at all.

George Bilbrey

 "Many marketers aren’t even aware that one-fifth of their emails are never reaching the inbox," said George Bilbrey, President, co-founder, Return Path. "In many cases, marketers are seeing ‘delivered’ metrics that repeatedly show a 95% to 98% delivery rate. Unfortunately, many ESPs and marketers have developed the belief that whatever emails aren’t bouncing have successfully reached the inbox."

"That’s just not true, as these numbers show. Marketers need to examine their current deliverability stats, and remember that hard bounces aren’t the only emails that aren’t reaching your subscribers."

The U.S. deliverability rates are slightly better than Canada with an average of 82 percent reaching their destination, while Canada’s inbox rates are lower with 75 percent of emails landing in subscriber’s inboxes.

Successful deliverability to subscriber’s inboxes varies by ISP. The top five U.S. ISPs ranked in order of difficulty for marketer’s emails to reach user’s inboxes are Gmail, Hotmail, MSN, Comcast, and AOL.

Marketers have an even more difficult time reaching business email addresses that are protected by email monitoring systems such as Postini, Symantec and MessageLabs. On average, 27.6 percent of commercial emails sent to business addresses don’t reach the inbox.

"As ISPs continue their daily battle to keep consumers’ inboxes protected from the onslaught of spam, legitimate commercial emails that consumer want to receive aren’t being delivered," said Bilbrey.

"It’s imperative that marketers dig into their deliverability stats to truly see how many of their emails are successfully reaching the inbox."

People make judgments about email they receive, by reading it, filtering it, or tossing it out unopened. Return Path believes it can take some of the mystery out of the process by providing a service to monitor just how recipients handle an email marketer’s messages.

The company recently announced its Sender Score Reputation Monitoring service. They build a score based on data contributed by ISPs, filtering companies and other email receivers.

“Any company can look up its overall email reputation score and know exactly how they look to ISPs and other email receivers. Return Path clients also get the underlying data that tells you WHY your score is what it is,” George Bilbrey, VP & GM Delivery Assurance Solutions, wrote in a statement.

Return Path provided more information about their service in that statement:

The company also claims email receiving services are building support for the summary Reputation metric into their systems. Return Path said it will make the score available free of charge via DNS query, a move that should spur more ISPs to use it in the future.

Return Path also noted in a separate statement it would rename its Bonded Sender program to Sender Score Certified. It is the industry’s leading accreditation system, used by more than 35,000 receiving domains, including MSN Hotmail, Windows Live Mail Beta and Roadrunner, covering more than 250 million email mailboxes worldwide.

As part of the change, the program has dropped its long-standing requirement for members to post a financial bond. They also added tougher compliance standards based on data available in Return Path’s Sender Score Reputation Monitor database.

“The standards and metrics are transparent to all involved. Those who don’t comply will be removed from the program swiftly, making the traditional bond aspect of the program an unnecessary step,” said Matt Blumberg, CEO of Return Path.

“Removing the bond also answers program critics and competitors who painted it – erroneously – as a paid spam program.”

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.