With Volumes Soaring, Email Marketers Face Deliverability Hurdles on Cyber Monday

One in Four Emails Sent on Crucial Online Holiday Shopping Day Never Made it to the Inbox, Shows Data from Pivotal Veracity

PHOENIX, Ariz., December 2, 2009—Nearly one in four email marketing messages were not delivered to recipients’ inboxes on Cyber Monday, according to new deliverability data released today by Pivotal Veracity, the industry leader in cross-platform email deliverability and optimization solutions. Celebrated as the busiest day of the year for e-commerce transactions, this past Monday saw inbox delivery rates plummet to a 7-day low of just 76.2%.

“Cyber Monday has become a veritable trench warfare of offers, specials and hype in consumers’ email inboxes,” said Deirdre Baird, president and CEO of Pivotal Veracity. “As delivery queues get packed with messages, ISP spam filters go on high alert and many marketers end up with lower inbox delivery rates.”

Global web traffic peaked at more than 7.9 million visitors per minute to retail sites on Monday, according to Akamai Technologies, and the National Retail Federation said web visitation was up 8 percent compared to last year. According to ComScore, Black Friday also saw heavier than expected web shopping, reporting that retail site visits were up 11 percent compared to 2008.

“The temptation to mail every Tom, Dick and Harry on your list can be hard for marketers to resist—especially with the holiday shopping season now in full swing,” added Baird. “But sending out a last minute offer to someone who hasn’t purchased anything from you in the last 12 months is going to shoot you in the foot, and could even have longer term consequences for your reputation in an environment where ISPs are increasingly looking for signs of positive user engagement in deciding whether or not to deliver your mail.”

Methodology

To provide an accurate picture of email delivery rates across vertical markets and segments, the data in the Black Friday & Cyber Monday 2009 Deliverability report leverages Pivotal Veracity’s eDelivery Tracker Solution. The eDelivery Tracker maintains email addresses at hundreds of leading ISPs/email providers around the world, with default spam-filtering settings left intact. eDelivery Tracker customers send campaigns to these "seed accounts", and the system is set up to automatically login to each account to identify whether the message was received, sent to the spam folder or blocked, providing directional insight into senders’ true deliverability. The data used in the report reflects benchmark averages across all Pivotal Veracity clients from November 23 – November 30, 2009, gathered from thousands of unique campaigns.

About Pivotal Veracity

Pivotal Veracity is the number one ranked independent email delivery auditing and optimization company. The company provides a suite of solutions that empower permission-based enterprises with tools and expertise to improve the credibility, deliverability and effectiveness of their online communications. Pivotal Veracity’s solutions are offered directly to businesses as well as through a network of more than forty leading email deployment platforms, service providers and agencies worldwide. For more information, visit www.pivotalveracity.com.