We’ve recently been reading Return Path’s yearly ‘Deliverability Benchmark’ report for 2015, in which they’ve studied over 350 million commercial emails in order to understand deliverability trends and issues all over the world, broken down by regions but also a wide range of industries.

The results make for interesting reading, and also highlight the importance of making sure your emails are following best practice guidelines to minimise the risk of any issues that could affect your results.

This year for example, they’ve found that overall worldwide inbox placement has dropped from 83% in 2014 to 79% this year, which means that 1 in 5 emails sent ended up going into spam folders, or even worse, being blocked altogether. Here in the UK, this downward trend was even more prominent, where Return Path saw a drop from 87% in 2014 to 82% now.

So why is this happening, and more importantly what can you do to protect yourself as much as possible?

The report highlights a range of factors, but it’s worth noting that this year Return Path reported a massive 7% rise in email traffic globally. This suggests that there is more competition for your emails to stand out as they vie for attention amongst potentially saturated inboxes.

At the same time, mailbox providers like Gmail rely ever increasingly on recipient engagement to determine where to place incoming mail. This means that if your recipients are not reading your emails, the likelihood of the mailbox letting future sends in decreases as they determine it to be unwanted content.

This emphasises the importance of sending clear, concise, easily engageable content that’s relevant to recipients. This should minimise the risk of being lost in crowded inboxes and your deliverability reduced as a result.

For more information on best practice and how to create engaging emails, download our Guide to Creating Irresistible Email.

Alternatively, if you’re interested in improving inbox placement through Return Path certification, Pure360 can help you set this up. Please email contact@pure360.com if you’d like us to get in touch.