No matter how careful we are in designing and implementing an email campaign, there will always be messages that will end up being directed to a spam folder in our recipient’s email.
The company Return Path has analyzed how frequently users “rescue” those emails from their mailboxes and why. Few acts of a consumer or a user show their degree of loyalty to a brand or company that the volunteer “rescue” of one of them.
Most email management programs allow users to browse the contents of their junk mail before deleting their content, and also offer the ability to “retrieve” those emails that may inadvertently have been terminated there.
It is not surprising that researchers establish relationships between that rescue and the strength of the brand behind it. According to George Bilbrey, president of Return Path, “Virtually each and every sender sees their messages ending up in the spam folder, but only a few get recipients to look for them.”
Return Path has analyzed how many emails have been retrieved, calculating what is known as a TINS (This is not spam) ratio, or percentage of how many messages are retrieved by the user. Thus, within an analyzed group of more than 1 billion messages that in the first quarter of the year ended in the spam box, less than 2 ‰ (0.17%) deserved the favor of the recipient.
But not all brands get the same grace of the consumer. According to Return Path, among the companies with the best ratio of TINS are Apple, Amazon Etsy, Match.com, Netflix and United Airlines, among others.
“Senders with better TINS ratio share common features that go beyond good practices in email marketing,” Bilbrey said. “They use intelligence based on data to connect with consumers and study their behavior, making decisions that help improve their loyalty in all channels.”
“The TINS ratios are related to high levels of engagement,” says Bilbrey. “A higher percentage of read messages means that there is a greater chance that messages that end up in spam can be recovered,” he continues.
From the companies studied, senders with a reading rate of less than 9% tend to have a TINS ratio of 0.14%, while those with a reading rate of 22% or greater, achieve a TINS ratio of 0.97% Six times higher. Forwarding percentages suggest similar scenarios. Those with a TINS ratio of 0.5% have up to six times more chances that their emails will be forwarded.
Among the categories as the highest TINS ratio are travel, appointments and jobs.
Retail and social media networks suffer the lowest TINS, with 0.11% and 0.10% respectively, probably due to the high number of messages they send, as well as to the fact that the recipients of the mails are not usually given Of subscription services they no longer want, according to Return Path.