Inbox placement improving, spam placement remains the same

The global trend of delivery data increased over the last eight quarters, with a growth of 4 percent inbox placement, according to 250ok. Missing emails saw a decrease of 5 percent, while spam folder placement remains rather stable with less than 1 percent change.

Of the global seed accounts 250ok studied, Canada was the only country with a dip in email deliverability, as the 3-year transition period for Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) came to an end and marketers cleaned their lists of older implied consents.

Email deliverability in both the United States and United Kingdom saw a 4 percent increase in inbox placement.

The inaugural benchmark report highlights the global view of Inbox Placement Rates (IPR) for marketing campaigns sent in 2016 and 2017. 250ok reviewed the historical reporting of nearly 1 million seed-based tests to provide a quarter-over-quarter view of email message delivery to seed accounts in North America, the European Union, Russia, Brazil, Oceania and China.

“Email seed lists are a control group modeling unbiased mailbox behavior,” said Paul Midgen, 250ok advisor and former Microsoft/Hotmail senior program manager. “They provide a valuable data point because Gmail, Outlook, and every other major ISP have different global filtering behaviors.”

In terms of webmail provider growth, Office 365 saw the largest year-over-year growth, followed by Yahoo. Gmail and Google apps also continue to grow at a moderate rate, while Hotmail and AOL saw significant loss in footprint.

“Over the last year, Verizon’s email platform migrated to AOL in 2017 and Outlook.com migrated to Office 365’s infrastructure,” said Tim Moore, vice president of customer solutions at 250ok. “We anticipate marketers will need to be mindful of the impact on reputation filters and how delivery protocols might affect deliverability.”