SmallBusinessNewz

It's a well-known fact that some people shuffle small businesses' emails straight into spam folders.  Others delete them, and then there's the array of folks who mark stuff as read, look at emails but never follow through, and so on.  Unfortunately, it seems that a great many emails never reach the intended recipients in any sense.

Return Path, which deals in email deliverability (make of that what you may), reported earlier this week, "In the second half of 2009, 19.9% of commercial, permissioned emails never reached consumers inboxes in the United States and Canada."

Which amounts to a guaranteed failure rate of about one out of five (on average).  Which is bad, of course.

Small business owners might do well to research just how many of their emails are making it through.  Return Path stated, "The top five ISPs for senders to reach consumer inboxes in the United States ranked in order of difficulty were BellSouth, Gmail, MSN, Hotmail, and Yahoo," so perhaps you can use that information to either set up test accounts or seek out customers and see what's going on.

Businesses in Europe should have a little easier, at least, with 85.5 percent of emails reaching inboxes there.