Twenty percent of email in the U.S. and Canada is not making it to the inbox, according to a new study from email deliverability services company ReturnPath.

ReturnPath’s Global Deliverability Benchmark study for the second half of 2009 pinpoints several reasons why these numbers are so high (via MarketingCharts):

1. Many senders still don’t have access to reliable data on their deliverability situation. They rely on reports that show a “delivered” metric that tends to be 95% or higher, but in most cases this is not the Inbox Placement Rate - the percentage of mail that actually arrives in the inbox. Rather, it is a reporting of the number of messages sent minus the number that returned a hard-bounce message. This creates a false impression that nearly 100% of email messages arrive as intended.

2. Senders are leaving a lot of money on table - on average about 20%. Marketers find it easier to concentrate on the money they can make easily rather than focusing on improving deliverability rates.

For example, if a retailer deploys a campaign to 1 million subscribers with an average conversion rate of 5% (50,000 buyers) for a value per conversion of $10, it should earn $500,000 in revenue. But with only an 80% inbox placement rate, only 800,000 subscribers would receive the email, and revenue drops to $400,000 for that same campaign.

Multiply that by the number of campaigns sent every year and it turns into millions of dollars in lost revenue. What senders fail to realize is that those dollars can be recouped simply by maintaining a good reputation and implementing basic best practices that improve inbox placement.

3. Senders are still failing to implement best practices around reputation and behavior. Reputation is the driving factor that determines whether or not email makes it to the inbox, Return Path says. However, not all use such tactics as welcome messages or easy opt-out procedures.

4. Global campaigns require different approaches. The Return Path survey also found better deliverability rates overseas. In Europe, 85% of email arrives as expected with 3.6% ending up in the”junk” or “bulk” folder and 11% not delivered at all. Asia Pacific does better than Europe and North America with 86.9% of email delivered to the inbox, 3% is “bulked” and another 10% is missing.

About the Survey: ReturnPath conducted the Global Deliverability Benchmark for the second half of 2009 by monitoring data from its Mailbox Monitor service for email campaigns deployed from July to December 2009. ReturnPath tracked delivery, blocking and filtering for more than 600,000 campaigns. In addition, ReturnPath reviewed non-delivered data for hundreds of ISPs in the United States, Canada, France, Germany, United Kingdom and the Asia Pacific territories.

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