In mid-October, the Interactive Advertising Bureau released a 14-page white paper on a topic of interest to anyone who sends out regular advertising or marketing emails. If your email marketing campaigns haven’t given you the return on investment you’ve been expecting, you owe it to yourself and your business to read this paper. Keep reading to learn some of the high points.
The white paper is titled "Marketer & Agency Guide to Email Deliverability," and is available from IAB's web site in PDF format. It starts off with a little history, explaining how we ended up with the current email environment in which it's difficult for an honest advertiser to get his message out to prospects. It gives a definition of email deliverability, goes over the factors that affect it, and points out what email marketers can do to improve the odds of their emails safely reaching user inboxes and being opened.
The white paper was issued by the IAB's Email Committee. We're likely to see more from this group, since the paper is more of a starting point, albeit a good one, than a definitive document. As it correctly points out in the executive summary, "It is important to recognize that the deliverability landscape changes multiple times per year and the best practices for monitoring and resolution change with it."
That doesn't mean it isn't useful right now. "Providing the marketers with a single standard definition of deliverability as well as accurate and timely information around causes of deliverability problems and measurements is an extremely important step in solidifying email as a critical performance marketing vehicle," said Craig Swerdloff, General Manager, Customer Acquisition Programs at Return Path and IAB Email Committee Chair.
Definitions are always a good first step. It's interesting to note that one reason click fraud has been so difficult for search engines and SEMs to get a handle on is because nobody can agree on a definition. So what's the definition of email deliverability? It's the ability of an email marketer to deliver email to a recipient's inbox with all of the functionality the recipient expects (i.e. HTML or text) as stated in his or her preferences. Contrary to popular belief, deliverability itself is not a metric; it is made up of several metrics. Now that you know what it is, let me explain why the IAB thinks it matters.
Website Marketing 
