AUTHORS

Alexander Heinz | Matthew Vernhout | Tim Moore

GLOBALBENCHMARKREPORTQ1•2018

GLOBAL BENCHMARK REPORT

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IntroductionData CollectionDomain Market ShareDeliverability Global

Big 4

United Kingdom

North American

United States

Canada

TakeawaysAbout the AuthorsAbout 250ok

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ContentsTABLE OF

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IntroductionThe email marketing landscape continues to evolve, and the ability to successfully deliver mail continues to challenge senders around the globe. Our inaugural benchmark report highlights the global view of Inbox Placement Rates (IPR) for marketing campaigns sent in 2016 and 2017. Our research shows a continued rise of global IPR for most of the key geographical regions on which marketers remain focused.

Continued adoption of email authentication for marketing purposes is heavily driven from Email Service Providers’ configurations for clients, but seems to fail to make it back to the proper corporate domains. In 250ok’s recent report DMARC Adoption Among e-Retailers1, we noted almost 90% of corporate root domains fail to properly support a minimum authentication standard of SPF and DMARC.

Over the last year we saw a significant shift in the internet service provider space, with Verizon’s email platform migrating to AOL in 2017, then looking forward, AOL’s migration to Yahoo/Oath in early 2018, and the migration of Outlook.com to Office 365’s infrastructure. The latter is causing a lot of headaches for marketers, as reputation filters play catch-up with the influx of messages and marketing programs adjusting to the new delivery protocols.

1 DMARC Adoption Among e-Retailers: s.250ok.com/eRetailDMARCQ1

GLOBAL BENCHMARK REPORT

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Data Collection250ok reviewed the historical reporting of nearly 1 million seed-based tests, using seed data within the 250ok Inbox tools and campaigns sent between 2016 and 2017, to provide a quarter-over-quarter view of email message delivery to our seed accounts in the top geographical regions most impactful to our clients.

Why use seed data versus panel data? As believers in data accuracy and controlled testing, seed data allows senders to run tests prior to deployments, to gauge the potential delivery impacts of a campaign, and to send in real-time alongside a campaign to monitor for any changes while deploying a message. Also, based on the geographical distribution of panel members and the small overlap of members on typical email lists, the statistical sample size is not usually diverse enough to provide valid sample. As an example, your list may be 40% Gmail users, while a panel may be represented by 95% Gmail accounts, and the remaining 5% is Hotmail, AOL, and Yahoo accounts. We also found many of these accounts to be of questionable origin in our review, based on usage data available from Google. See more on this in our post “The Truth About Email Panel Data.”2

“Email seedlists are a control group modeling unbiased mailbox behavior. They provide a valuable data point because Gmail, Outlook, and every other major ISP have different global filtering behaviors.

PAUL MIDGEN250ok advisor & former Microsoft/Hotmail senior program manager

2 “Truth About Email Panel Data”: s.250ok.com/PanelDataTruth

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Domain Market ShareYear-over-year comparison of growth and targeting for email marketers domains based on the distribution of consumer’s email accounts, as determined by 250ok’s domain optimization services.

DOMAIN MARKET SHARE 2016 vs. 2017

Gmail Hotmail Yahoo Office 365 AOL Google Apps ATT Comcast Proofpoint Apple Other

2016 2017

DOMAINS

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GlobalBig 4United KingdomNorth AmericaUSACanada

Deliverability

GLOBAL BENCHMARK REPORT

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GlobalOur global analysis includes deliverability data from North America, EU, Russia, Brazil, Oceania, and China.

A positive trend towards the end of 2016 continued throughout 2017, with a 4% increase in inbox placement and a 5% decrease in missing emails. Trends show 8 out of 10 emails are making their way into the inbox of consumers, up from 7 out of 10 emails in early 2016.

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GLOBAL QUARTERLY IPR 2016 vs. 2017

Q22016

Q32016

Q42016

Q12017

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Inbox Spam

Q12016

Missing

n= 935,000 deployments

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Big 4Even with significant changes in infrastructure at Hotmail/Outlook domains, delivery to the Big 4 webmail providers (AOL, Hotmail, Gmail, and Apple) increased by 4% in the last half of 2017.

• Verizon migration to AOL in Q2 2017• Hotmail migration to O365 in Q4 2017

KEY ITEMS TO REMEMBER

BIG 4 QUARTERLY IPR 2016 vs. 2017

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Q32016

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Inbox Spam Missing

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n= 935,000 deployments

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United Kingdom

DELIVERABILITY SPOTLIGHT

Moderate growth in the UK shows a decrease in missing and spam folder placement, totaling 4% of emails moving into the inbox over the last 3 quarters of the year.

UNITED KINGDOM QUARTERLY IPR 2016 vs. 2017

Q22016

Q32016

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n= 935,000 deployments

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Delivery rates in North America continue to hover around 80%, but when comparing 2016 and 2017, a moderate 3% increase occurred. This is tied to stronger performance in the USA, counterbalanced by an increase in spam folder delivery in Canada.

North AmericaCANADA, MEXICO, & USA

DELIVERABILITY SPOTLIGHT

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NORTH AMERICA QUARTERLY IPR 2016 vs. 2017

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Q12016

Inbox Spam Missing

n= 935,000 deployments

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With the ongoing consolidation of ISPs, delivery rates in the United States are improving across the board, showing 4-quarter growth and an annual increase of 4% to the inbox.

KEY ITEMS TO REMEMBER

United States

DELIVERABILITY SPOTLIGHT

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UNITED STATES QUARTERLY IPR 2016 vs. 2017

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Inbox Spam Missing

n= 935,000 deployments

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After steady quarter-over-quarter growth of inbox placement in 2016, 2017 recorded a dip in delivery as the 3-year transition period for Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) came to an end and marketers worked to clean their lists of older implied consents.

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Canada

KEY ITEM TO REMEMBER

It’s important to note in June 2017, the Private Right of Action under CASL was suspended by the government, right around the same time delivery rates dipped. However, it’s unclear if the two are related.

DELIVERABILITY SPOTLIGHT

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CANADA QUARTERLY IPR 2016 vs. 2017

Q22016

Q32016

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Q12017

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Q32017

Q42017

Q12016

Inbox Spam Missing

n= 935,000 deployments

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TakeawaysThe global trend of delivery data appears to be gradually increasing over the last 8 quarters, with a global growth of 4% inbox and a global decrease of 5% to missing emails. Spam folder placement remains rather stable with less than 1% change.

Domain distribution impacts on email lists is reflective of migration and consolidation in the mailbox provider space, led mostly by back-end infrastructure changes and mailbox hosts mergers. For example: Hotmail reduced in popularity slightly while Office 365 grew, and Verizon and Yahoo continue to grow while AOL shrinks in popularity.

Based on data imported and reviewed by the 250ok seedlist optimizer tool3, Office 365 tops our review with the largest year-over-year growth of 1.37%, followed by Yahoo with 1.14%. Gmail and Google apps also continue to grow at a moderate rate (0.2%), while other large email providers saw significant loss in footprint: Hotmail (-2.02%) and AOL (-1.17%).

3 seedlist optimizer tool: https://250ok.com/tour/seedlist-optimizer/

4%global inbox growth

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About the Authors

Matthew Vernhout is the Director of Privacy at 250ok and is a Certified International Privacy Professional (Canada) with nearly two decades of experience in email marketing. He actively shares his expertise on industry trends, serving as director at large of the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email (CAUCE), chair of The Email Experience Council’s (EEC) Advocacy Subcommittee, and senior administrator of the Email Marketing Gurus group. He is a trusted industry thought-leader, speaking frequently at email marketing and technology conferences around the globe, and maintaining his celebrated blog, EmailKarma.net.

Matthew Vernhout250ok, Director of Privacy

Alexander is the Solution Architect at 250ok with nearly a decade of experience in the industry (Adobe Campaign and Vistaprint). All of his time spent in the email world has been in roles focused on solving deliverability issues and developing tools and strategies to optimize clients inbox performance.

Alexander Heinz250ok, Solutions Analyst

Tim is the Vice President of Customer Solutions at 250ok and an email deliverability expert. He became the “Swiss army knife” of the deliverability world through combined experiences at a traditional ESP (Oracle Marketing Cloud), a cloud-based ESP (Message Bus), and a third-party vendor (Return Path).

Tim Moore250ok, VP of Customer Solutions

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250ok focuses on advanced email analytics, insight and deliverability technology to power a large and growing number of enterprise email programs, ranging from clients like Pinterest, eHarmony, and Marketo who depend on 250ok to cut through big data noise and provide actionable, real-time analytics to maximize email performance. For more information, visit 250ok.com.

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