Reports are getting louder that some - perhaps as many as one in four - email marketing messages sent on Cyber Monday were not delivered to recipients' inboxes.

Nearly one-fourth of email marketing messages did not reach their intended destinations, according to new deliverability data released by Pivotal Veracity. Though it has been dubbed the biggest online shopping day of the year, this past Monday saw inbox delivery rates plummet to a seven-day low of just 76.2%.

There were several factors that hampered delivery, the company said. These started with the huge wave of offers and specials sent out by marketers. As delivery queues became packed, however, the ISP spam filters went on high alert and discarded a number of the messages, according to Deirdre Baird, Pivotal Veracity's president and CEO.

The Retail Email blog also believes marketing messages went astray this week. Some emailers were experiencing deliverability issues early on this holiday season, according to Heather Goff, senior deliverability consultant at Responsys. "It's possible that some retailers sent email on Black Friday and Cyber Monday that could have been filtered or blocked."

Traffic Still Huge

The missing emails apparently didn't translate into curtailed sales or sites visits. The day was deemed a success by many measurement firms, although there has been disagreement over how much improvement there was vs. 2008, writes Retailer Daily.

Underlying the varying traffic figures is the growing view by retailers that Cyber Monday is equally as important as Black Friday (via the Retail Email blog).  "Both Black Friday (Nov. 27) and Cyber Monday (Nov. 30) hit all-time highs in terms of email volume. Cyber Sunday (Nov. 29) - the day before Cyber Monday - also saw record email volume."

On Black Friday, 69% of major online retailers sent at least one promotional email, up from 59% in 2008, as tracked by the Retail Email Blog. On Cyber Monday, 71% sent at least one promotional email, making it both the most popular retail email day of this year and also the most popular of all-time. Last year, 70% of retailers sent email on Cyber Monday. And on Cyber Sunday, 45% of retailers sent at least one promotional email, up from 36% last year. This made Nov. 29 the biggest Sunday ever for retail email marketing.

What To Do?

Retail emailers can take several steps to ensure that emails in these campaigns actually reach their intended recipients. For starters, they might want to consider holding off on blast campaigns, Pivotal Veracity's Baird suggested. "The temptation to mail every Tom, Dick and Harry on your list can be hard for marketers to resist. But sending out a last minute offer to someone who hasn’t purchased anything from you in the last 12 months is going to shoot you in the foot, and could even have longer term consequences for your reputation in an environment where ISPs are increasingly looking for signs of positive user engagement in deciding whether or not to deliver your mail."

Marketers should also come to terms, once and for all, with the fact that consumers will only open emails that truly seem relevant to them, said Marco Marini
, CEO
 of ClickMail Marketing, (via the Email Experience Blog). "The deliverability of your email is now being determined by the ISP based on the recipient’s interaction with that email, he wrote. "Some of the major ISPs are zeroing in on the inbox to decide whether or not your emails are to be considered worthy of being delivered in the future.

"How your recipients interact with your emails - and if they do at all - will now be taken into account," Marini added. "If you keep sending emails a certain someone never opens, the ISP is going to decide that in the eyes of that certain someone, you are in fact spam and should be blocked."

Tips to consider, he said:

• Segment your list and target your messages to make them more relevant.
• Set up a profile page where subscribers can choose how often to hear from you and the type of information they want to get from you.
• Put your subscribers first, offering them the content they want, not the content you want to feed them.