What if you knew that 20% of the e-mail that you sent to opt-in subscribers wasn’t reaching its destination. Would you change the way you look at your ROI? According to recent statistics from Return Path, you should.

This poses two issues for e-mail marketers:

• How can you increase deliverability?
• What is the correct measure for determining ROI?

Obviously, you can’t count bounced e-mail as deliverable. The problem seems to be, however, that we’re all getting more bounces than we believe we are because some of the e-mail we think is getting through isn’t. And we’re not getting an undeliverable report on the return. That most definitely affects ROI.

As an example, if you send 100 e-mails and you have a bounce rate of 10% then there’s an additional 20% that you should include in the bounce rate. Instead of 90 deliverables you should only count 72 deliverables. That’s a 72% deliverability rate. If you close an average of 25 e-mails from that 100 then you don’t have a 25% conversion rate nor is it 27.7%. Rather, your conversion rate is 25/72, or 34.7%.

Why is that significant. It’s very significant because if you can figure out a way to decrease the undeliverables then you’ll make more sales. Now the question for savvy e-mail marketers is, How?

Tags: bounce rate, conversion rate, deliverability rate, e-mail marketing, roi

This entry was posted on Friday, February 5th, 2010 at 5:48 am and is filed under E-mail Marketing for Small Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.