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?
