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Sending email to the top UK email domains

Emailcenter have conducted research into what the top UK B2C email domains are. This article records the findings and suggests techniques to consider when emailing recipients at these ISP’s.

Why is this important?

Each ISP has its own set of rules for filtering emails and many of the main web mail providers such as Hotmail find it difficult to display many HTML emails correctly.

By knowing what the make up of your list is you can identify the which domains to focus your efforts into ensuring you beat spam filters and also making sure your email is displayed correctly.

The Results

There are five main ISP’s that dominate consumer email lists. These make up on average 48% of a list.

The breakdown of the average number of each of these in a consumer list is detailed in the graph below:

The research also pointed out some interesting trends. Firstly bounce rates at the web-mail clients such as Hotmail and Yahoo tend to be considerably less than the likes of Wanadoo and BT Internet whom also provide consumers with their internet connection. This can presumably be explained by consumers whom change their ISP have to change their email address. In addition some of these higher bounce rates could also be attributed to the ISP changing the domain in their users email address.

Tips for each ISP

AOL

  • Monitor your bounce rates and ensure you keep them under 10% for AOL addresses. AOL may block you if you exceed this amount.
  • Be careful with the use of CSS in your email. AOL struggles to display this correctly.

Hotmail/MSN

  • Hotmail has recently introduced sender ID recognition. This is about matching the from address the email is sent from and the IP address. If they do not match then Hotmail will flag this to the recipient. In the future messages that do not match are likely to go straight to the junk mail folder. Speak to an Emailcenter account manager if you need help in becoming sender ID compatible.

Wanadoo/Freeserve

  • Wanadoo and formerly Freeserve have changed the domain name behind the email address a few times and the news that they are to be re-branded as Orange suggests this will happen again soon. It might be possible to do an update of all addresses with a find and replace or alternatively you might have to ask your recipients for their new address.

Yahoo!

  • Yahoo! are working on a number of email verification technologies similar to Microsoft sender ID. Make sure you are working with an email service provider whom is constantly monitoring the advances in these technologies.

BT

  • BT have aligned with Yahoo! To create BT Yahoo! which shares much of the same technology for users accessing their email via the web. In addition BT offer a number of anti-spam tools for users that use Outlook to access their email. These spam filters change all of the time so it is worth monitoring the open rate for emails sent to BT Internet and BT Openworld addresses to identify any problem areas.