IAB Releases Guidelines for Email Deliverability - Who Cares About Deliverability?
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You might not care about the deliverability of your marketing emails, or think that it simply isn't a problem. Either you've been very lucky up to now, or you're living in denial. According to the IAB, more than 60 billion emails are sent out every day, and of these, 80 percent are spam. This is more or less in line with what anti-spam organizations such as Spamhaus have stated.
With all that noise, it stands to reason that there are some false positives out there. In fact, the IAB believes that more than 20 percent of the legitimate marketing messages, sent by honest businesses, are incorrectly identified as spam. These messages wind up in a user's spam folder or get filtered out at the server level; either way, they miss the target. With messages going missing, marketers see lower open rates, lower response rates, and lower conversion rates.
In short, deliverability issues mean your advertising campaign doesn't perform as well as it should. If you still think it's not a problem for you, look at that number again: 20 percent. That's one in five. If you maintain a large mailing list for, say, a weekly or monthly newsletter, that can really affect your performance. We're not particularly unusual in that regard; Developer Shed sends out a weekly newsletter to 220,000 subscribers, and another 15,000 or so subscribe to our SEO-specialized newsletter. I can tell you there would be much consternation here if we found that one out of every five of our newsletters was not reaching its destination!
If you've done everything right, your users care about the deliverability of your email as well. It's true that many consumers find most marketing messages to be an annoyance at best, even the ones for which they have signed up; people do change their minds. But if your message is truly relevant, users look forward to seeing it. Even if they don't convert then, they may well convert later. So how do you make sure they have that opportunity? The first step involves understanding the hurdles you face.
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