Top 10 Email Domains of 2006
By Tom Kulzer January 2, 2007
During 2006 the top 10 email domains have grown from representing 61.25% of email web form requests in January to 65% in December.
This growth indicates, now more than ever, it’s important to test your email newsletters for both how they look at top domains as well as overall email deliverability. Having issues with just a single top domain can significantly impact campaign results.
Interesting standouts:
- aol.com steadily falling from 9.35% of requests in January to 7.82% in December.
- gmail.com steadily rising from 3.49% of requests in January to 4.86% in December.
- 8 of the top 20 domains are outside of the United States.
- 6 of the top 20 domains have deliverability managed by Yahoo (~28.91% of requests in December).
December percentage of newsletter and information requests by domain.
| 1 | yahoo.com | 23.30% |
| 2 | hotmail.com | 19.25% |
| 3 | aol.com | 7.82% |
| 4 | gmail.com | 4.86% |
| 5 | msn.com | 2.21% |
| 6 | comcast.net | 1.84% |
| 7 | hotmail.co.uk | 1.65% |
| 8 | sbcglobal.net | 1.63% |
| 9 | yahoo.co.uk | 1.33% |
| 10 | yahoo.co.in | 1.11% |
| 11 | bellsouth.net | 0.91% |
| 12 | verizon.net | 0.73% |
| 13 | earthlink.net | 0.70% |
| 14 | cox.net | 0.68% |
| 15 | rediffmail.com | 0.60% |
| 16 | yahoo.ca | 0.64% |
| 17 | btinternet.com | 0.57% |
| 18 | charter.net | 0.43% |
| 19 | shaw.ca | 0.43% |
| 20 | ntlworld.com | 0.41% |
Data analyzed consists of over 43 million opt-in web form requests for email newsletters and other information of AWeber customers throughout the year.
[Edit 01/24/07: Sort order was off slightly for results 10-20 due to initial sort being done via annual average and not December]
Thomas Annerino
1/2/2007 10:06 amBecause of web based email programs I think a plain text newsletter is the most effective. Don’t get me wrong. I love HTML emails but I have noticed a better response on just plain text email.
Andrew
1/3/2007 6:57 amLove these tips as they have worked well for me improving my results with my client base. Keep up the good work as it is appreciated!
Andrew
Nana
1/3/2007 10:53 amIt sounds good. but I’am still in my basic stage in my e-mail newsletter delivery. hope to catch up if I finish delivering my first email newsletter to my clients. Keep it up Tom Kulzer
Nana
Chris
1/3/2007 1:52 pmAny idea how high Roadrunner (rr.com) ranks?
AnnaLaura Brown
1/3/2007 9:06 pmwow this is interesting.
Donovan
1/4/2007 9:01 amchris -> my thoughts exactly.
Jamie Ratliff
1/6/2007 12:12 amI am with Thomas here, I send out primarily text based emails and avoid any problems. I find that many people actually like a no frills text email, and then a link to either see a pretty html page or to the actual product.
Great Information Here!
Amy
1/8/2007 2:15 amThanks for the stats.
We usually get better response on plain text emails.
Jay
1/8/2007 7:19 amInteresting article. I’m pleased that my first aweber.com autoresponse didn’t get filtered to my Yahoo spam bin, but the same autoresponse from another leading autoresponder service DID go to my spam folder.
Pete
1/10/2007 2:35 pmI’m pleased to have it confirmed WHY my E-mails never seem to get through to my friends using NTL. Are they REALLY that bad?
I thought AOL was bad. I’m always getting ‘good’ E-mails trashed.
Many that I know have been sent, don’t even get that far.
Pete.
sally neill
1/14/2007 6:24 pmAny thoughts on what Thomas said, is a plain or html better?
Love the stats, glad gmail is rising its my fav online email.
sally 🙂
Justin Premick
1/15/2007 9:45 amSally,
Ultimately that’s something you should test to see what your own subscribers prefer. We have a lot of users who send plain text-only messages as well as a lot who send text/HTML, and it’s impossible to say that one is definitively better than the other for everybody.
Placing an HTML version of the message on your website and then including a link to that page in your message is an oft-used way of driving subscribers back to your site. If you prefer to send plain text-only messages, it’s something you may want to try out.
Mike Bridge
1/23/2007 5:59 pmI think the sorting isn’t quite correct on those stats. Not like it’s statistically significant, but e.g. yahoo.ca at 0.64% should be above rediffmail.com at 0.60%, and so on.
Adrian
10/14/2007 4:57 pmThere is another level of filtering taking place that might not be so obvious, but is very damaging to deliverability as I have discovered, and is indpendant of ISP’s.
The Microsoft Outlook client filters incoming messages that it considers as spam directly to the junk box.
The definition of spam is not configured by the user apparently, but by Microsoft through the default filters, and the filter updates it presumably gets through the "Update" utility.
This is an insidious filtering because it is recorded as delivered bt AWeber, but is then trashed by the mail client before the User sees it. All my messages sent through AWeber are being filtered and junked in this way, so the only deliverables are the ones where the recipient does not use Outlook. I do not know whether this applies to Outlook Express – if it doesn’t it probably will sooner or later.
I suggest that AWeber needs to approach Microsoft to whitelist AWeber sent messages either by default, and/or through the Update program that updates the filters.
Failing to do this will mean that deliverability numbers are meaningless and much lower than indicated.
Justin Premick
10/15/2007 10:00 amAdrian,
While content filtering does affect email deliverability, it’s by no means unique to the Microsoft Outlook email client, and is a manageable challenge.
The filtering that you refer to is not a result of you sending your email through AWeber. It’s a matter of what content appears in your messages.
There are things you can do to get more of your email to the inbox, and they apply to Outlook as well as to major webmail clients. One of the most important ones is to have subscribers add you to their address books.
With respect to Outlook 2007, Microsoft says:
"You can specify a list of e-mail addresses or domains whose messages should always be treated as junk; you can also specify a list that should never be treated as junk."
Major webmail clients such as Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL, Gmail work in much the same way.
Providing whitelisting instructions to your subscribers (on your Thank-You page, for example) can help your messages reach the inbox.