Sender Score Benchmark Report
The Return Path Sender Score™ measures a business’ ability to communicate with its customers. every ISP uses different criteria to determine whether email should be delivered to the inbox, filtered to a spam folder, or blocked altogether. however, The Return Path Sender Score is a universal metric that predicts deliverability across ISPs with a high degree of accuracy. More importantly, by transparently laying out the key factors impacting email deliverability and explaining how they can be optimized, we help businesses increase the chances that their emails will land in customer inboxes. Simply put, the Return Path Sender Score helps businesses and ISPs communicate more effectively.
The 2012 Return Path Sender Score Benchmark Report additionally addresses:
• The global email deliverability context.
• The components of the Return Path Sender Score.
• Global trends in key areas including email volume, complaints, unknown users and spam traps.
• Sector and region-specific deliverability trends.
Finally, we’ll review ways that businesses can improve their Sender Scores. as an index of an email sender’s reputation, the Sender Score is a crucial tool that ISPs can use to make deliverability decisions, and that businesses can use to improve their chances of reaching customer inboxes. when emails fail to reach inboxes, businesses fail to communicate—with a direct impact on the bottom line.
For more information please email rpinfo@returnpath.net. © 2012 Return Path, Inc. www.returnpath.net | v010512

after reviewing 130 m illion IP addresses sending nearly 20 trillion emails, we found that over 85% of these messages received by ISPs are classified as spam.
• Spam levels decreased by 40% from January through april, in part due to the takedown of the Rustock botnet.
• Spam levels increased 45% from June through december.
• The average IP address had a Sender Score of 25.96, compared to 90.46 for Return Path clients.
Sender reputations across the globe and industry sectors were affected primarily by the following factors:
• unknown user rates or those email addresses no longer in active use
• complaint rates when email recipients mark a message as spam
• Spam traps, an email address set by ISPs to deliberately catch spammers worldwide, North american senders had the best reputations with an average Sender Score of 67. The eMea (europe,
Middle east and africa), aPac (asia-Pacific) and caLa (central and Latin america) regions all fared much worse with average Sender Scores of 22, 20 and 18 respectively. No country in these regions had acceptable reputation rates indicating a need to understand and follow best practices.
Social Networking sites are in need of the most improvement with an average of 20 spam traps per IP address and unknown user rates above 5%. Retailers and banking industries struggle with complaint rates of 2.96% and 3.16%.
having a good sending reputation is possible. For senders achieving a Sender Score of 90 or greater, they can achieve an average delivered rate of 95%. For the major webmail providers, a Sender Score above 90 means an 81% inbox placement rate at Gmail, almost 80% at hotmail and 90% at yahoo!.
Most Email Is Spam
There are trillions of emails sent every year, and the vast majority of them are spam.
Global Sender Score ™ Distribuon
70 %
60 %
50 %
40 %
30 %
20 %
10 %
0 %
60.00%
16.40%
2.99% 2.73% 3.14% 2.62% 2.56% 1.96%
90-100: Great
80-89: Good
70-79: Fair
60-69: Bad
50-59: Very Bad
01-49: Blacklist
2.15%
5.45%
For more information please email rpinfo@returnpath.net.
© 2012 Return Path, Inc. www.returnpath.net | v010512
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after a significant drop in the beginning of 2011, spam volume steadily increased after July, as did the total number of messages blocked. emails that were delivered (including emails filtered into spam folders) steadily increased throughout 2011.
40M
35M
30M
25M
20M
15M
10M
5M
Global Average of Total
DELIVERED
Global Average of Total
ATTEMPTED
Global Average of Total
BLOCKED
It’s important to clarify what we mean by “spam.” we don’t mean emails offering you subscriptions to magazines you already receive, or credit cards you don’t need, or social networks you’re already a part of. Those emails aren’t filtered with quite as much care as they could be, but by and large the offers they’re making are legitimate. when we talk about “spam,” we’re talking to emails you almost never see: the messages that get routed to your spam filter, or blocked before they ever reach your account. These are emails sent from “illegitimate” and “unknown” accounts as well as millions of computers infested with Trojans and running as “zombies.” These emails should never have been sent; no ISP should accept them, and this spam accounts for over 85% of all emails.
Protecting email recipients from this huge volume of spam is not quite as difficult a challenge for ISPs as it might sound.
Three-quarters of illegitimate emails come from IP addresses that are completely egregious: they do not have reverse dNS; they didn’t send a single email in years and then 100,000 in a day; and so on. Their Sender Scores range from
0 to 50; handling them is easy. The challenge comes in deciding what to do with border cases: IPs that score in the
50 to 70 range. a good percentage of these are spammers, but others are legitimate senders who fail to implement deliverability best practices. Inevitably, IPs will mistakenly identify some of the latter as spammers.
For more information please email rpinfo@returnpath.net.
© 2012 Return Path, Inc. www.returnpath.net | v010512
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Not Becoming Collateral Damage in the War Against Spammers very few legitimate businesses will find their IPs scored between 0 and 40 for a prolonged period of time. excepting those who have had their IPs hacked by spammers, this range consists almost entirely of senders engaging in practices that are more accurately described as “criminal” than “sloppy.” however, a significant percentage of businesses might find themselves with scores between 60 and 80, with the result that many of their emails will be blocked or filtered as spam. The opportunity costs are significant: without inbox placement, click-through and conversion rates fall to nearly zero—taking revenue and RoI down with them. In fact, businesses with Sender Scores ranging from “Bad” to “very
Bad” fail to place nearly 80 percent of their emails in recipient inboxes.
Sender Score
0 - 60
61 - 70
71 - 80
81 - 90
91 - 100
Sender Score Bands and Average Delivered
Average Delivered
21%
67%
68%
92%
95%
Sender Score
0 to 50
51 to 60
61 to 70
71 to 80
81 to 90
91 to 100
Gmail
26.35%
29.53%
32.09%
38.61%
62.31%
81.09%
Inbox Percent
Hotmail
34.51%
29.77%
36.31%
41.20%
61.39%
79.71%
Yahoo
46.61%
51.99%
55.85%
62.46%
79.71%
89.89%
For more information please email rpinfo@returnpath.net.
© 2012 Return Path, Inc. www.returnpath.net | v010512
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ISPs are understandably eager to protect their users. But, in doing so, they may be blocking or filtering emails from legitimate senders. while ISPs continually work to improve their filtering algorithms, the onus is on businesses to improve their deliverability best practices.
In this Return Path report, we’ll review the factors that impact inbox deliverability in detail, as well as global patterns we discovered in 2011. Finally, we’ll review deliverability best practices and how they can improve your Sender Score.
™
Return Path Client Average
Global Average
The Return Path Sender Score is calculated on the basis of various sending behaviors. In our review of global deliverability trends in 2011, we’ll review three of these components in detail.
Complaints: The volume and percentage of emails from an IP address that recipients mark “Spam.”
Unknown Users: The percentage of emails sent from an IP address to non-existent addresses.
Spam Traps: The number of emails sent from an IP address to decoy accounts ISPs use to catch spammers.
For more information please email rpinfo@returnpath.net.
© 2012 Return Path, Inc. www.returnpath.net | v010512
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Complaints
“complaints” are registered when email recipients mark a message “spam.” ISP algorithms are crucial, but no metric is more important than user-reported complaints. as a result, this is the single most important indicator affecting email deliverability. Specifically, our data show that email senders need to keep their complaint rates at one-tenth of one percent or below in order to avoid negatively impacting inbox placement.
Total
5.0%
4.0%
3.0%
2.0%
1.0%
0
Total complaint volume spiked at two points in 2011. The first was in late-February and early-March. The second, more predictably, was in mid-November, as businesses ramped up email volume for the holiday season. complaint rates rose along with complaint volume early in the year. however, while complaint volume spiked during the holiday season, complaint rates were comparable to the highs in late-February and early-March. This is consistent with patterns in previous years. Total email volume rises to such an extent during the holiday season that recipients can’t keep up. Rather than marking this huge volume of holiday messages spam, many recipients simply deleted messages, causing a drop in overall complaint volume. Furthermore, users have no incentive to complain about multiple messages from the same sender. a single IP might send three messages a day during the holiday season, but many recipients will only mark one of them “spam,” driving overall complaint rates further down.
Unknown Users
“unknown users” are email addresses no longer in active use. These include email addresses that have never existed, as well as abandoned email addresses.
Businesses are unlikely to send emails to addresses that have never existed, unless they are automatically generating addresses or engaging in other “black hat” practices. Businesses are more likely to send emails to addresses that are no longer in use. Most often, this is because they have kept addresses on their lists despite a long-term lack of engagement. however, the highest volume of unknown users emails are the result of businesses collecting their users’ address books and sending messages to the entire list. (This accounts for the high percentage of unknown user among social networking sites, described in the Sector analysis below.)
It is inevitable that businesses will have unknown user addresses in their lists. Therefore, ISPs only block senders if their unknown user rate is as high as 5 to 10 percent. however, businesses should still aim to keep their unknown user rate as low as 2 percent.
For more information please email rpinfo@returnpath.net.
© 2012 Return Path, Inc. www.returnpath.net | v010512
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Spam Traps while “unknown users” are email accounts that happen to be out of use, ISPs set up spam traps for the express purpose of catching spammers. an unknown user rate of up to 5 percent is acceptable, but sending messages to even a single spam trap can kill a sender’s reputation. In fact, many Blacklist operators use Spam Traps to determine which addresses to block.
There are two kinds of spam traps:
1. Email accounts that have never been in use. These account for the majority of spam traps.
2. Recycled email accounts. More rarely, ISPs use abandoned accounts as spam traps. (To exclude legitimate senders, they first send codes to previous recipients indicating that the account no longer exists.) as with unknown users, social networking sites send the highest number of messages to spam traps, for reasons explained in the Sector analysis below.
North american Sender Scores are significantly higher than scores in other regions. Many regions (including china,
Brazil, Spain, Italy, and even France) deliver spam almost exclusively.
In all regions, Return Path client averages far outperform regional trends.
Region
North America (NOAM)
United States
Canada
Europe, Middle East & Africa (EMEA)
United Kingdom
Spain
Italy
Germany
France
Asia-Pacific (APAC)
China
Australia
Central and La„n America (CALA)
Brazil
Average Sender Score
67
66.93
70.22
22
50.75
26.84
22.42
33.24
47.43
20
35.56
55.79
18
15.88
Return Path Client Average
90
90
85
85
91.5
82.4
91.1
84.6
84.2
72
75.9
94.0
82
83.7
For more information please email rpinfo@returnpath.net.
© 2012 Return Path, Inc. www.returnpath.net | v010512
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Canada
United States
Average
Sender Score
70
67
North America
Average
Complaint Rate
1%
5%
Average Unknown
User Rate
6%
4%
Average
Spam Traps
4.90
2.29 despite having the highest sending reputations globally, the u.S. and canada have issues with complaints, unknown users and spam traps. The u.S. also has very few restrictions around non-permission acquisition of email addresses, which puts marketers at risk for acquiring spam traps and receiving high subscriber complaints.
France
Germany
Italy
Spain
United Kingdom
Average
Sender Score
47
33
22
27
51
EMEA
Average
Complaint Rate
3%
6%
3%
2%
1%
Average Unknown
User Rate
10%
7%
5%
6%
6%
Average
Spam Traps
11.48
3.52
6.58
6.77
6.35
The most surprising thing about reputation metrics in europe is that they are so low when they have some of the strictest laws around acquiring email address. For example, in Germany where double opt-in has been seen as the law, their Sender
Score was 33 and they had above average complaint rates, unknown users and spam traps. France, having a Sender Score of 47, had one of the highest Sender Scores in europe, but had the biggest problem with unknown users and spam traps, indicating that marketers have issues with list hygiene and keeping their lists up-to-date. Italy and Spain also had slightly above average complaints, unknown users and spam traps with their Sender Scores coming in very low at 22 and 27 respectively. The uK had the highest Sender Score of 51, but is struggling with high unknown user rates of 6% and high average spam trap rates of an average of six per IP address. This indicates that european marketers are at high risk for blocking and filtering.
For more information please email rpinfo@returnpath.net.
© 2012 Return Path, Inc. www.returnpath.net | v010512
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Australia
China
Average
Sender Score
56
36
APAC
Average
Complaint Rate
2%
1%
Average Unknown
User Rate
9%
7%
Average
Spam Traps
5.71
1.72
It’s not surprising that china has a low Sender Score of 36. It’s an emerging market and the email senders may have a harder time understanding reputation factors and what it takes to get delivered to inboxes outside of china. while their reputation metrics appear to be low, it’s because a majority of their email is blocked and never delivered. Return
Path’s last deliverability Benchmark Report showed that 80% of their mail was blocked. Therefore, if you can’t get your mail delivered, you can’t send to a spam trap, much less have a subscriber mark your email as spam.
australia has typically high deliverability rates, which is somewhat reflected in their Sender Score. however, with unknown user rates at 9% and and having nearly six spam traps per IP address, they need to focus on how they acquire and handle new and and old addresses.
Brazil
Average
Sender Score
16
CALA
Average
Complaint Rate
3%
Average Unknown
User Rate
7%
Average
Spam Traps
4.87
historically, Brazil has struggled with deliverability and their reputation . It’s an emerging market and email marketing is relatively new. additionally, Brazil sends out a lot of email which would be considered spam which is causing an issue with their extremely low Sender Score of 16. with a complaint rate of 3%, unknown user rate of 7% and average spam traps at nearly five, most marketers have a long road ahead in resolving their deliverability and reputation issues.
For more information please email rpinfo@returnpath.net.
© 2012 Return Path, Inc. www.returnpath.net | v010512
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Most industry sectors performed at or near global averages. But there were significant outliers in a number of categories:
1. High frequency of spam traps among social networking senders. one of the most important tools social networks use to grow their subscriber base is the address books of their current users. however, this presents a risk: most email recipients do not actively manage their address books, resulting in numerous unused or abandoned emails being present. as a result, social networking sites were hitting an average of 20 spam traps.
2. Social networking and gaming had the highest degree of unknown users. For reasons outlined above, social networking and gaming sites also have unusually high unknown user rates.
3. The highest complaint rates occurred in social networking, banking, retail, and corporate services. other industries had complaint rates above two percent, but social networking, banking, retail, and corporate services were the only sectors to approach or breach a three percent average.
Note: all sector data refers to Return Path customers. (while we can categorize IP addresses by region, we cannot use
IPs alone to determine industry sector.)
4%
3.5%
3%
2.5%
2%
1.5%
1%
.5%
0
3.2%
1.0%
2.0%
3.0%
Bank ing
Consumer
Produ cts
Co ns um er
Se rvices
Co rporate Se rvices
0%
Ga mi ng
3.0%
3.5%
1.0%
Retail
So cia l N etw ork ing
Third-P art y L ist
Vendors
25
20
15
10
5
0
.1
2.0
.02
.05
Bank ing
Consumer
Produ cts
Co nsu me r S ervices
Co rporate Se rvices
.0
Ga mi ng
20.8
.08
.09
Retail
So cia l N etw ork ing
Third-P art y L ist
Vendors
For more information please email rpinfo@returnpath.net.
© 2012 Return Path, Inc. www.returnpath.net | v010512
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3%
2%
1%
0
6%
5%
4%
4%
3%
1%
3%
Bank ing
Consumer
Produ cts
Co ns um er
Se rvices
Co rporate Se rvices
5%
Ga mi ng
1%
5%
2%
Retail
So cia l N etw ork ing
Third-P art y L ist
Vendors
Improving Your Return Path Sender Score a healthy Return Path Sender Score is no more optional for businesses than a healthy credit score. Neglect your email deliverability reputation and you’ll fail to reach thousands of your customers. and even if your emails are delivered, a poor Sender Score could mean that they aren’t reaching recipient inboxes. Given how infrequently email recipients elevate messages from the spam folder, that’s as good as being blocked.
The first step toward improving your Sender Score is finding out what it is. we offer free access to our Sender
Score to any sender, receiver or consumer of email at our reputation portal: http://www.senderscore.org.
Senders and receivers can register with senderscore.org for free to gain access to detailed reports on the metrics that drive their sending reputation.
The next step is to reduce your complaint rate:
• Sign up for feedback loops with your ISP(s). This service, provided by nearly every ISP, lets you know every time a recipient marks one of your messages “spam.”
• Periodically analyze your complaints to locate patterns of subscriber discontent. If particular offers or subject lines perform poorly, quickly fix them.
Finally, practice the basics of list hygiene:
• collect good, clean data about your email subscriber base.
• Track bounces and remove unknown users.
• Implement a win-back and resting strategy to deal with inactive subscribers.
and if you need additional support, Return Path is here to help.
For more information please email rpinfo@returnpath.net.
© 2012 Return Path, Inc. www.returnpath.net | v010512
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Return Path conducted this study by monitoring data from its Reputation Network from January to december
2011. This study tracked the reputation rates for more than 130 m illion IP addresses sending nearly 20 trillion emails to ISPs in Return Path’s Reputation Network. For each IP address, Return Path recorded total messages sent, delivered and blocked. we also reviewed unknown user, complaint, and spam trap rates for each IP address. we assign each IP address its own score, called a Sender Score, based on these data points.
Return Path makes email work better by scoring and certifying email senders from around the world. we help marketers, publishers and other large-volume email senders increase their response rates by providing the world’s leading inbox deliverability solution. we help mailbox providers and email administrators at ISPs and enterprises block unwelcome and malicious email by providing near real-time IP reputation scores and other data-driven tools. Taken as a whole, these tools and services improve the consumer experience of email by protecting them from spam, phishing and other abuse. Return Path offers free access to Sender Score, the email reputation measure compiled through our cooperative data network of ISPs and other email receivers, at our reputation portal: http://www.senderscore.org
.
Information about Return Path can be found at h ttp://www.returnpath.net
.
New York
304 Park avenue South, 7th floor
New york, Ny 10010, uSa
Phone : +1 212-905-5500
California
100 Mathilda Place, Suite 100
Sunnyvale, ca 94086, uSa
Phone : +1 408-328-5000
Colorado
8001 arista Place, Suite 300
Broomfield, co 80021, uSa
Phone : +1 303-999-3100
Australia
Level 20, 201 Sussex Street
Sydney NSw 2000, australia
Phone : + 61 2 9006 1591
Brazil
Av. Brig. Faria Lima, n.º
1690 – Cj. 142
São Paulo – SP CEP
01451-001
Phone: +55 11 3740 8300
United Kingdom
12 Melcombe Place
London, Nw1 6JJ, uK
Phone : +44 (0) 845 002 0006
France
1 71 avenue charles de Gaulle
92200 Neuilly sur Seine, France
Phone : +33 (0)1 82 88 59 75
Germany
Neuer wall 80
20354 hamburg, Germany
Phone : +49 (0)40 822 138-438
For more information please email rpinfo@returnpath.net.
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