The statistics you receive on your email marketing campaigns can be a bit deceiving. The numbers of delivered emails may seem high, but you have to remember that some email accounts may view a bulk fed email as spam and send it to a file that is never visited by the email account holder and is ultimately and automatically discarded without the customer even being aware it arrived. The good news is many email service providers and email marketers are working together to increase email deliverability. Currently the figure for non-deliverable emails stands at just over 20%.

Your client can help improve that figure if they automatically whitelist or approve your email for acceptance by their email system. Individual Internet Service Providers (ISPs) can also be contacted and, by following their procedures, you may find your emails going to the right email box without being subjected to the junk or spam file.

Because spam has been so prevalent it has taken a significant amount of work to keep email relevant while making it more difficult for spammers to make email their playground. This interim period has caused many recipients to become frustrated with email, but the persistent work of many has helped to reclaim this effective communication tool.

Consider the following from Epsilon Interactive…

1. Too many marketers continue to miss out on deliverability "easy wins." The number of marketers encouraging consumers to add them to their address books, which provides marketers with benefits commensurate to Enhanced Whitelisting, remained unchanged between 2005 and 2006 (43 percent vs. 42 percent).

2. Relevance rises. The majority of consumers (60 percent, up from 57 percent last year) agreed that the email communications they receive from companies they do business with are more targeted/relevant than the communications they received from those same companies last year.

3. Email's impact on purchasing is felt across channels. Consumers who receive legitimate email offers are more likely to act on them, with 47 percent of respondents saying they would make a purchase online after opening a relevant email and 65 percent indicated they would purchase offline based on the email they received.

Epsilon also indicated consumers are more adept at recognizing false positives and are much more aware on online safety and spyware issues.

It would appear that legitimate email marketers as well as the email recipient are willing to work together to find the best solution in sending and receiving emails that are welcome and informative.