Return To Spender: Undelivered Emails Cost Businesses $59+ Billion Annually

For years, I’ve written about how email marketing continues to not only be a cost-effective and customer-engaging channel, but also a great ROI generator that is already seeing positive AI impacts.

But there’s a side to the email marketing story that a recent Mailtrap study uncovered and affixed a fairly unexpected price tag to when it doesn’t go as planned.

“‘The best return on investment,’ ‘$40 for every dollar you invest’ are just some of the things you’ll hear online about email marketing,” writes Mailtrip’s Dzenana Kajtaz in the report. “And while all these statements are true, what’s also true is that deliverability, or lack thereof, to be more specific, costs email marketers worldwide millions every day.”

Crunching such stats as an 84.6% average deliverability, an $0.11 revenue per email, and 9.7 billion emails sent daily, Mailtrap says U.S. businesses waste more than $164 million on undelivered mail each day. Taken over a year, that’s more than $59.5 billion.

“It’s evident that the financial losses due to undelivered emails can be catastrophic,” the report says, while pointing out the industry variances that might affect certain revenue and deliverability numbers in the equation. “Across the studied industries, you can see one trend … the more emails end up in spam folders, the bigger the loss.”

For instance, Mailtrip found the largest loss ($213.4 million) in finance and insurance, which they calculate misses the most inboxes with the largest spam (8.4%) percentage as well as the largest percentage (11.6%) that’s “missing” both spam and inbox folders. On the other end, real estate’s $30.9 million loss is helped by reaching 97.1% of inboxes (with spam covering 0.8% and “missing” just 2.1%).

Mailtrip, being an email delivery platform, suggests starting with an email deliverability audit. My company, Mirabel Technologies, designed Marketing Manager as a CRM and email marketing automation platform, and then created Clean Your Lists specifically to help businesses verify their email address lists in real time to save time and money. However you address it, your emails don’t need to be contributing to the $59 billion blackhole.

“If your email sender reputation is stellar, reaching the inbox won’t be a challenge,” the report says. “But if your reputation is poor, ISPs are very likely to mark your emails as spam or block them altogether.”

For more information about how to improve your email deliverability, download A Beginner’s Guide to Email Marketing by Mirabel’s Marketing Manager: