Goodmail and Pivotal Veracity Release Vertical-Market Deliverability Benchmarks for Q1 2009

Twenty Percent of Business-to-Consumer Messages to Qualified Email Addresses Don’t Get Delivered

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. and PHEONIX, Ariz. June 15, 2009, Goodmail Systems, the creator of CertifiedEmail™ and CertifiedVideo™, and Pivotal Veracity, the industry leader in cross-platform email deliverability and optimization solutions, today released co-authored research that found 20 percent of legitimate marketers’ email messages were routed to spam folders or blocked entirely in the first quarter of 2009. Five percent of messages were found in spam folders, with even more – 15 percent – unaccounted for.

“Deliverability remains a major barrier to email marketing success. A study we conducted with Forrester Research last year found that fifty-two percent of marketers called deliverability one of their top five challenges,” said Peter Horan, CEO of Goodmail. “These data confirm that their concern is justified – legitimate marketers across a variety of industries, even those who adhere to best practices and follow the law, suffer widespread junk folder placement and instances of missing or blocked email.”

Unfortunately, many email marketers lack insight into how deliverable their campaigns truly are, hindering the ability to correct issues and maximize results. This is because most email marketing software applications are designed to calculate a campaign’s “delivery rate” by subtracting the total number of “bounces” (i.e., delivery failure reply notices) received in response to the total number of email sent, and not, in fact, the total number of email messages that have actually been delivered to the inbox. As a result, email that ends up in the spam folder or gets blocked and “black holed” is often counted as “delivered.”

“Marketers shouldn’t just familiarize themselves with their email marketing software reporting tools, they should build a robust and ingrained knowledge of them,” recommends Deidre Baird, CEO of Pivotal Veracity. “To get the most accurate picture, they should supplement standard bounce rate reporting with monitoring tools that provide better insight into whether campaigns are actually being delivered to the inbox or are being sent to the spam folder or blocked.”

To provide an accurate picture of email delivery rates across vertical markets, the data in Goodmail/Pivotal Veracity Q1 2009 Email Deliverability Benchmarks report leverages Pivotal Veracity’s eDelivery Tracker Solution. The eDelivery Tracker 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 login to each account to identify whether the message was received, sent to the spam folder or blocked, providing directional insight into senders’ true deliverability. The data used in the report reflects benchmark averages across all Pivotal Veracity clients from January 1 – March 31, 2009, gathered from hundreds of thousands of unique campaigns.

The complete Goodmail/Pivotal Veracity Q1 2009 Email Deliverability Benchmarks report is available for complimentary download here.

About Pivotal Veracity

Pivotal Veracity is the number one ranked independent email delivery auditing and optimization company for large enterprises. The Company provides a suite of solutions that empowers permission-based enterprises with tools and expertise to improve the credibility, deliverability and effectiveness of their online communications.

 

About Goodmail Systems

Goodmail Systems is the creator of CertifiedEmail™, the industry’s standard class of email. CertifiedEmail provides a safe and reliable means for consumers to easily identify authentic email messages from legitimate commercial and nonprofit email senders. Each CertifiedEmail is sent with a cryptographically secure token that assures authenticity and is marked in the inbox with a unique blue ribbon envelope icon, enabling consumers to visually distinguish email messages which are real and sent from email senders with whom they have a pre-existing relationship. Available to email senders meeting strict standards for best practices and low complaint rates, it is the only class of e-mail available that assures delivery of all opt-in e-mail messages to the inbox, with links and images automatically rendered intact, and embedded multi-dimensional applications like CertifiedVideo™ for streaming video, yielding measurable improvements in e-mail effectiveness. CertifiedEmail has been adopted by seven of the nation's top 10 email mailbox providers and is in use by 500 commercial, government and non-profit senders. It is supported in North America and Europe by a wide network of email platforms and service providers.

Goodmail Systems is the creator of CertifiedEmail™, the industry’s standard class of email. CertifiedEmail provides a safe and reliable means for consumers to easily identify authentic email messages from legitimate commercial and nonprofit email senders. Each CertifiedEmail is sent with a cryptographically secure token that assures authenticity and is marked in the inbox with a unique blue ribbon envelope icon, enabling consumers to visually distinguish email messages which are real and sent from email senders with whom they have a pre-existing relationship. Available to email senders meeting strict standards for best practices and low complaint rates, it is the only class of e-mail available that assures delivery of all opt-in e-mail messages to the inbox, with links and images automatically rendered intact, and embedded multi-dimensional applications like CertifiedVideo™ for streaming video, yielding measurable improvements in e-mail effectiveness. CertifiedEmail has been adopted by seven of the nation's top 10 email mailbox providers and is in use by 500 commercial, government and non-profit senders. It is supported in North America and Europe by a wide network of email platforms and service providers.

Media Contacts

PR@GoodmailSystems.com and

Denise Vardakas
The Conversation Group
denise@theconversationgroup.com
+1-650-483-5083