Bad News for E-mail Marketers: Do You Need More Reasons for RSS?

As noted many times before, e-mail marketing is becoming increasingly difficult due to spam filters that usually don't stop just at filtering out unwanted e-mail but also e-mail we subscribe to.

The latest MarketingSherpa article, based on a study conducted by Pivotal Veracity, paints an incredibly worrying picture, with even 18% of all transactional e-mail (welcome messages, confirmation e-mails etc.) being filtered out.

Here are just some of the more interesting points:

"Turns out 54 major mailers from AARP to The Wedding Channel can't get their permission email messages past filters at Hotmail, Yahoo, and/or Gmail all the time either. Even AOL's own outgoing email newsletter department couldn't get all of its bulk mailings past other ISPs' filters."

"Sadly, according to this study, being an accredited Bonder Sender mailer doesn't help you get through to Yahoo, Hotmail or Gmail either (although it may help with other ISPs)."

"The good news is double opt-in mailers were 20 points more likely to avoid filters than single opt-in mailers. (Double opt-ins had a 39% filter rate and single had a 59% rate.)"

"Multiple industry studies show 20% or more of permission email doesn't reach recipients' in-boxes (and worse for at-work addresses)."

Many e-mail marketers have been counting on the Bonder Sender program to help them get their e-mail through. But now it seems that even this solution isn't helping much.

As an e-mail/RSS marketer I don't plan to stop using e-mail, but this is just one more sign that companies need to start paying attention to RSS now!