What are the organizational costs of undelivered email?
Summary
What email marketers say10Marketer opinions
Email marketer from Gmass shares that if many emails are undelivered, re-engagement campaigns are needed to try and reach unresponsive subscribers, increasing marketing spend and effort.
Email marketer from Email Marketing Forum shares that a high percentage of undelivered emails will damage sender reputation which impacts future deliverability.
Email marketer from Mailjet responds that maintaining a clean email list and removing invalid addresses (which cause undelivered emails) requires time, effort, and potentially the cost of using list cleaning services.
Email marketer from Email Geeks shares that some undeliverables, if left unaddressed (bounces for example) can eventually lead to being blocked, compounding the amount of undeliverable email and the amount it's costing you.
Email marketer from Campaign Monitor shares that creating and sending emails that never reach the inbox wastes the time and resources of the marketing team, reducing overall productivity.
Email marketer from Reddit shares that if emails aren't delivered, recipients never see your message, meaning the opportunity to reinforce brand awareness is lost. This can lead to a weakening of brand recognition over time.
Email marketer from Litmus explains that if potential customers don't receive onboarding or promotional emails due to deliverability issues, it raises customer acquisition costs, as you're losing potential customers due to deliverability problems.
Email marketer from Sendinblue shares that undelivered emails lower the ROI of email marketing campaigns by wasting resources on messages that never reach the intended audience.
Email marketer from HubSpot responds that transactional emails (e.g., abandoned cart recovery) not being delivered, leads to lost revenue as customers cannot complete their purchases.
Email marketer from Neil Patel Digital explains that undelivered emails lead to missed opportunities to connect with potential customers and build relationships, ultimately impacting revenue.
What the experts say3Expert opinions
Expert from Word to the Wise shares that email marketers are losing money because their messages aren’t making it to the inbox. Even if inboxing rates are only a few percentage points lower than they should be, there are associated costs that add up quickly, this could be from bounces or other delivery issues.
Expert from Word to the Wise explains that inaccurate or incomplete data severely diminishes the effectiveness of email programs, leading to wasted resources, and missed opportunities to engage with subscribers. This includes costs of bad data such as hard bounces.
Expert from Email Geeks explains that it doesn’t matter how much you spend on planning a campaign, crafting your message, or designing a compelling email if it’s just sat in a spam folder because if the recipient doesn’t see it, it didn’t happen.
What the documentation says4Technical articles
Documentation from Google Workspace Admin Help explains that sending emails to invalid or non-existent addresses wastes server resources and bandwidth, increasing operational costs.
Documentation from Microsoft Docs explains that a high bounce rate due to undelivered emails can negatively impact a sender's reputation, leading email providers to filter messages as spam.
Documentation from SparkPost explains that monitoring deliverability metrics, identifying undelivered emails, and troubleshooting delivery issues requires specialized tools and expertise, adding to operational overhead.
Documentation from Amazon Web Services (AWS) explains that undelivered emails can lead to increased support costs due to customers contacting support teams to report missing emails, requiring investigation and resolution.