ISP Spam Filters on High Alert Week Before Christmas

Instances of Blocked Email Rose as Marketers Pumped Out Last Minute “Ship before Christmas” Offers

PHOENIX, Ariz., January 6, 2010 – The week before Christmas was the worst for email marketing deliverability during this past December’s critical holiday shopping season, according to new data released by Pivotal Veracity, the industry leader in cross-platform email deliverability and optimization solutions. As marketers crammed inboxes with last minute pitches promising the arrival of their products before Christmas, ISP spam filters blocked a daily average of 11.26% of messages during the week of December 13th.

Key findings:

• Instances of blocking grew each week during the first three weeks leading up to Christmas.

• The worst day to send email during the month was December 17th, when 13.8% of email was blocked and just 78.8% of email was routed to recipient inboxes (with the remaining 7.5% found in spam or junk folders).

• Blocking began to subside when most retailers could no longer fulfill before-Christmas shipping: 12.2% of email was blocked on December 22nd— by the next day, the number dropped precipitously to just 6.4%.

• Blocks spiked again during the final days of 2009 as retailers pushed year-end clearance offers and post-holiday sales. December 28th – 30th saw blocking rates of 11.8%, 13.3% and 11.5%.

"With marketers sending more email to customers this holiday season than ever before, deliverability became increasingly difficult as Christmas grew closer,” said Deirdre Baird, president and CEO of Pivotal Veracity. “The best days for deliverability were earlier in the month and on weekends—save for the last weekend before Christmas, which saw abnormally high email volume relative to most weekends.”

According to RetailEmailBlog.com, December 2009 was the busiest month on record for retail email marketers since the site first began tracking retail email volume in 2006. Retailers sent an average of 15.4 email messages to each subscriber during the month, up from 14.6 in December 2008. Volume the week prior to Christmas 2009 was up 5% compared to the same week the year prior.

Methodology

To provide an accurate picture of email blocking, the data in this announcement leverages Pivotal Veracity’s eDelivery Tracker Solution, which 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 reflect benchmark averages across all Pivotal Veracity clients from December 1, 2009 – December 31, 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.