Your commercial email is getting eaten (yum)

Online marketing site, www.clickz.com reports that about 13% of all electronic mail messages are deleted as unsolicited by internet providers across the United States.

Their source of information is the latest Lyris EmailAdvisor report. Lyris tracks the "deliverability" rates of various internet providers on an ongoing basis.

Among their findings:

These figures are hard to compare to SpamButcher's performance. In my own case, SpamButcher blocks about 90% of all incoming messages. I suspect most other users have intercept rates well above 50%.

The underlying theme of the report appears to be that no sender of commercial email can be confident that their messages are being received.

So what should an online business that needs to contact its customers do? The answer is to test. I hesitate to recommend and third-parties for this purpose - but there are reasonable steps to take.

If your email is getting deleted, there are a few things to look for:

I always find myself surprised by what kind of messages get through, and which don't. The only way to develop reasonable confidence that you're reaching your customers is to do the groundwork so that you can intuitively understand the way different providers respond to various kinds of email.

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