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Jan 9, 2019
Latest Update: 7 Jan 2019
Email deliverability can really make or break an email marketing campaign. Most marketers know the theory behind boosting deliverability rates – maintaining clean lists, keeping subscribers engaged, building a good sender reputation, and so on. But many also know from experience that you can do everything by the book, and still have your emails mysteriously disappear after being sent.
Based on our email deliverability tests, we’ve confirmed what many marketers have long suspected – different newsletter services do have different deliverability rates. And the differences, in some cases, are quite startling.
As a result, we’ve decided to share our results, and have committed to performing regular tests to make sure our results are always up to date. We’ll continue to add them to this page with each round of tests.
Because we believe deliverability should be an important factor when deciding on which email tool is right for your business, we’ve also now added this as a criterion to each of our reviews.
Table of Contents
These rates represent an average derived from the five email deliverability tests in each testing round.
| Provider | Deliverability %
Aug 2017 |
Deliverability %
Mar 2018 |
Deliverability %
Jan 2019 |
|---|---|---|---|
| ActiveCampaign | 85.8 | 96 | 97 |
| AWeber | 80.3 | 79.8 | 75.6 |
| Benchmark | 63.9 | 75.8 | 49.2 |
| Constant Contact | 89.74 | 93 | 90.4 |
| ConvertKit | 92.1 | 88 | 81 |
| Drip | 89.14 | 89.8 | Not tested |
| GetResponse | 87.5 | 78 | 80.6 |
| MailChimp | 87.52 | 82.6 | 81.6 |
| MailerLite | 77.6 | 89 | 92.6 |
| Mailify | Not tested | Not tested | 71.4 |
| SendinBlue | 83.9 | 75.6 | 77.4 |
As you can see, deliverability rates can fluctuate over time. There does however seem to be some consistency between those that perform the best, and those that perform the worst. Specifically, ActiveCampaign and Constant Contact tend to have the highest rates of deliverability, while Benchmark and SendinBlue tend to have the lowest. One to watch out for is MailerLite, who seem to be improving significantly every round. For an analysis of the most recent results, see the blog from our latest round of deliverability tests.
Across the board, average deliverability was 82.7%. This is consistent with Return Path's own research, which found that the average global inbox placement rate was 85%.
It’s no surprise that there’s a direct correlation between low deliverability rates, and high rates of email flagged as spam. Below is a breakdown of where exactly emails ended up (whether it was the main inbox, a secondary tab, spam folder, or if it went missing), in each test round we’ve completed.
Based on these results, we can start to see some general trends:
Thanks to Glockapps.com, we were able to see just how well each newsletter service performed in getting delivered to the four main ISPs – Gmail, Microsoft (Outlook and Hotmail), Yahoo and AOL. Based on our results, you can see that certain ISPs definitely look more favorably upon some tools than on others.
| Provider | Deliverability % Aug 2017 | Deliverability % Mar 2018 | Deliverability % Jan 2019 |
|---|---|---|---|
| ActiveCampaign | 100 | 100 | 100 |
| AWeber | 100 | 100 | 100 |
| Benchmark | 50 | 100 | 0 |
| Constant Contact | 50 | 100 | 100 |
| ConvertKit | 100 | 100 | 100 |
| Drip | 100 | 100 | Not tested |
| GetResponse | 50 | 100 | 100 |
| MailChimp | 100 | 100 | 100 |
| MailerLite | 100 | 100 | 100 |
| Mailify | Not tested | Not tested | 80 |
| SendinBlue | 100 | 100 | 100 |
| Provider | Deliverability % Aug 2017 | Deliverability % Mar 2018 | Deliverability % Jan 2019 |
|---|---|---|---|
| ActiveCampaign | 50 | 100 | 100 |
| AWeber | 0 | 19 | 0 |
| Benchmark | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Constant Contact | 84.4 | 100 | 100 |
| ConvertKit | 84.4 | 83 | 86 |
| Drip | 0 | 100 | Not tested |
| GetResponse | 50 | 11 | 20 |
| MailChimp | 50 | 40 | 62 |
| MailerLite | 0 | 100 | 100 |
| Mailify | Not tested | Not tested | 35 |
| SendinBlue | 50 | 13 | 0 |
| Provider | Deliverability % Aug 2017 | Deliverability % Mar 2018 | Deliverability % Jan 2019 |
|---|---|---|---|
| ActiveCampaign | 100 | 100 | 100 |
| AWeber | 100 | 100 | 100 |
| Benchmark | 100 | 100 | 100 |
| Constant Contact | 100 | 100 | 100 |
| ConvertKit | 100 | 100 | 97.5 |
| Drip | 100 | 100 | Not tested |
| GetResponse | 100 | 97.5 | 100 |
| MailChimp | 100 | 100 | 100 |
| MailerLite | 100 | 100 | 100 |
| Mailify | Not tested | Not tested | 80 |
| SendinBlue | 100 | 100 | 97.5 |
| Provider | Deliverability % Aug 2017 | Deliverability % Mar 2018 | Deliverability % Jan 2019 |
|---|---|---|---|
| ActiveCampaign | 7.1 | 100 | 100 |
| AWeber | 100 | 100 | 80 |
| Benchmark | 0 | 80 | 100 |
| Constant Contact | 92.9 | 100 | 100 |
| ConvertKit | 100 | 100 | 100 |
| Drip | 100 | 100 | Not tested |
| Get Response | 85.7 | 100 | 100 |
| MailChimp | 100 | 100 | 100 |
| MailerLite | 100 | 100 | 100 |
| Mailify | Not tested | Not tested | 74.3 |
| SendinBlue | 85.7 | 100 | 100 |
What does this mean? Well, if you have a good sense of who your subscribers’ email providers are (in an ideal world, that would be Yahoo!), you might consider choosing a newsletter service based on this. Of course, that’s often difficult to know. Plus, as our results show, deliverability to ISPs can change over time.
It’s perhaps more useful to just keep an eye out for any red flags. For example, Microsoft clearly apply more stringent filtering to inbound emails, and some newsletter services – such as Benchmark and AWeber – seem to really struggle to get through to their inboxes. So if your deliverability rates are inexplicably low, this may very well be the reason why.
While the newsletter services were generally able to deliver to Gmail mailboxes just fine, not all ended up in the Primary tab. Perhaps this isn’t a surprise to anyone who’s used Mailchimp, but our first two rounds of tests found that MailChimp had a much higher chance of getting relegated to a Promotions tab – even with emails that wouldn’t normally be considered ‘promotional’.
In the latest round, however, this changed – only 60% of MailChimp’s emails to Gmail ended up in Promotions (instead of 100%). Other previously-safe providers also had a much higher chance of landing in Promotions (MailerLite, SendinBlue, AWeber, ConvertKit). ActiveCampaign, GetResponse and Constant Contact were the only providers who ended up in Gmail’s main inbox each time.
| Provider | Aug 2017 % | Mar 2018 % | Jan 2019 % |
|---|---|---|---|
| ActiveCampaign | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| AWeber | 0 | 0 | 60 |
| Benchmark | 20 | 0 | 0 (note – 100% went to spam) |
| Constant Contact | 11.4 | 0 | 0 |
| ConvertKit | 0 | 0 | 60 |
| Drip | 0 | 0 | Not tested |
| GetResponse | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| MailChimp | 100 | 100 | 60 |
| MailerLite | 0 | 0 | 60 |
| Mailify | Not tested | Not tested | 40 (note – 20% went to spam) |
| SendinBlue | 22.9 | 0 | 60 |
There’s no telling why some providers get sorted to Promotions and others don’t, as Google’s complex sorting algorithm is kept tightly under wraps. Ending up in Promotions is less than ideal, as your email is likely to get lost in the flood of emails that often make their way to that tab. Then again, if your email really is promotional and your subscribers are used to accessing emails from that tab, it may not be a problem.
Our tests looked at some of the most widely-used newsletter services:
Using Glockapps.com, we ran our first round of testing in August 2017. This round comprised 5 separate tests conducted over several weeks. We wanted to make sure all conditions were equal, so in each test, we:
Over three thousand emails later, we finally had the results from our first testing round. And we found some pretty big differences in deliverability rates between providers – ranging from 64 to 92 per cent!
We repeated this very same test round in March 2018, and in January 2019.
We’d love to know what the top performers' secret is – and we’re sure some of the other tools do too! What we do know is that the ISPs often have the last say on whether an email lands in an inbox. This means that they have to trust the mail server sending that email; in our case, that means the server used by the newsletter service.
If that same server also happens to be sending out emails for other clients that are considered ‘spammy’, deliverability of your own emails could suffer. Newsletter services therefore make it a priority to maintain their server’s reputation. But some are clearly doing a better job of this than others.
When choosing a newsletter service, there are obviously many factors to consider – price, features, usability, and so on. But with these results, we’ve hopefully made it easy for you to shortlist (or discard) a few based on potential deliverability.
Note that we said ‘potential’ – there’s simply no way of knowing for sure how deliverability will play out for each business. Our results can give you a general idea of what you can expect, and what things to look out for, but your own experience may be very different. If so, we’d certainly like to hear about it!
Does this mean marketers are completely powerless when it comes to the success of their campaigns? Not at all. If anything, these results really drive home the importance of understanding your subscribers – for example, how they engage with emails, and what content they’re likely to be interested in – and to tailor your email campaigns to their preferences. That way, even if you don’t have complete control over who gets your email, you’ll at least maximize their effectiveness with those who do.
