Did your emails reach the inbox during the Holiday Season?

We've been having issues with getting our emails delivered lately. Starting a few weeks ago, I saw a significant drop in the open and clickthrough rates for our emails. Then, all the Comcast.net and Roadrunner email addresses began bouncing. As these addresses comprise nearly 10% of our in-house list, I immediately reached out to our ESP to get the situation resolved.

Although the bounces are easy to catch, what about the emails that simply aren't getting delivered, or are winding up in the Spam or Bulk folders? A recent report by Pivotal Veracity indicated that on Cyber Monday 2009 (the Monday after Thanksgiving) only 76.2% of marketing emails made it to recipients' inboxes.

So what about the other 24.8%? For our largest email list, that number is about 56,000 customers... Customers who opted-in to receive email from us, and now, for whatever reason, will not. These deliverability issues mean lost revenue, as well as less connection with customers.

As email marketers, we need to carefully consider our strategies for Christmas 2010. Oversending, which by all indications was the biggest catalyst for this year's problems, isn't going to help us in the long run.