Email deliverability is a big deal if you're into email marketing; it's basically a measure of how many of your sent emails actually make it to the inbox and not the spam folder, (your deliverability rate is that number as a percentage of all the emails you sent out).
Why is this important for email marketers?
Well, no matter how awesome your email content is, if it's landing in the spam folder (or going missing altogether), it's pretty much going unread. That means lower engagement, fewer conversions, and ultimately, less ROI from your email campaigns.
So, understanding email deliverability statistics is crucial for making the most out of your email marketing efforts.
At EmailTooltester, we’ve always recognized the importance of measuring deliverability, which is why we’ve been running deliverability tests on all the major email marketing services for the past 6 years.
Below, you’ll find the most important email deliverability statistics, based on both our extensive testing, and other reputable sources from around the web…
What is the average email deliverability rate for marketing emails?
- As uncovered in our tests, the average email deliverability rate in 2024 across the 15 ESPs we tested is 83.1%
- Which means 16.9% of all emails never reach the intended recipient’s inbox.
- On average, 10.5% of emails end up in the intended recipient's spam folder
- 6.4% of emails go missing altogether and are considered “undelivered”
This means that nearly 1 in 6 marketing emails never reach the inbox!
What is a good email marketing deliverability rate?
- An email deliverability rate of over 89% is considered good
- An email deliverability rate of over 95% is considered excellent
- An email deliverability rate of below 80% is considered poor
Average email deliverability rate by ISP (Internet Service Provider):
- Google: 95.54%
- 57.8% arrive in the inbox
- 37.74% arrive in the promotions tab
- Microsoft (Outlook and Hotmail): 91.33%
- Yahoo: 81.33%
- AOL: 76%
These big four (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL), make up 87% of relative market share, which means 7 out of 8 emails are processed by one of these providers. The differences in deliverability rates between these providers, is a result of the different priorities and standards that each one applies to incoming emails.
We took this a step further and analyzed what proportion of political emails were being marked as spam per ISP, and found some interesting results! Only 5.2% of Joe Biden’s emails ended up in spam, compared to 40% of Donald Trump’s emails – find out which ISPs favored which political party here.
The 5 best email platforms for deliverability in 2024:
1. ActiveCampaign (94.2%)
2. ConstantContact (91.7%)
3. GetResponse (90.9%)
4. Moosend (90.1%)
5. CleverReach (90.0%)
The 5 worst email platforms for deliverability in 2023:
1. Aweber (83.1%)
2. Hubspot (77.7%)
3. Omnisend (75.1%)
4. Sendpulse (62.8%)
5. Benchmark (47.1%)
Other email deliverability statistics
Every year, Validity.com (a leading provider of email deliverability tools) produce a useful email deliverability benchmark report. Below you’ll find a summary of some of the most interesting findings in 2023 (although there’s plenty more in the report).
61% of email marketers polled in 2023, think that deliverability is getting harder
Average email deliverability rate by Region:
- North America: 87.9%
- Latin America: 81.1%
- Europe: 80.2%
- Asia Pacific: 78.2%
Average email deliverability rate by Country:
- Germany: 97.8%
- China: 92.7%
- Canada: 90%
- UK: 98.8%
- Australia: 98.7%
- France: 88.7%
- Brazil: 86.9%
- United States: 84.6%
- India: 69.8%
The deliverability rates for the different regions and countries (in the statistics above), are based on local mail providers rather than the big four of Google, Microsoft, AOL or Yahoo. The rules based (rather than user data based) filtering conditions often results in lower deliverability rates.
Regional anti-spam and data protection legislation (CAN-SPAM in the US, CASL in Canada, LGPD in Brazil, GDPR in Europe etc) and local customs may also account for some of the variations in deliverability rates.
The 5 best industries for deliverability in 2023:
- Real Estate (97.1%)
- Media & Internet (94.9%)
- Travel & Hospitality (94.5%)
- Holding Companies (91.6%)
- Construction (90.9%)
The 5 worst industries for deliverability in 2023:
- Manufacturing (84.7%)
- Nonprofit Organizations (83.5%)
- Business Services (83.4%)
- Telecoms (80.8%)
- Finance & Insurance (80%)
What explains the variability in deliverability rates between different industries? Most likely, the receptiveness of the recipients to certain types of emails. Emails from real estate and travel companies tend to be more welcomed, generating higher levels of engagement, than emails from finance and telecoms companies! Higher engagement rates leads to higher deliverability rates.
Email Deliverability Statistics Summary
If you’re involved with email marketing, you need to keep on top of deliverability. It’s important that you’re aware of the kinds of deliverability rates that are excellent, good, or acceptable (and those that aren’t).
It’s important that you understand the various factors that affect email deliverability rates, the best practices that you should be following to get the highest possible deliverability rates, and the email marketing services with the most reliable deliverability.
The statistics in this article will hopefully give you a good benchmark to work from, but check back regularly as email deliverability is in an ever evolving sate and the numbers change from year to year!
Related content: email spam statistics.
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08 April 2024 - Updated our deliverability test statistics
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This article has been written and researched following our EmailTooltester methodology.
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