• by Shankar Gupta , October 17, 2006

E-mail marketers that want to reduce spam complaints should routinely scrub their mailing lists, tell consumers in advance exactly what they will receive, and make it easy to unsubscribe--even if doing so leads to smaller list sizes. Those are among the key recommendations of new guidelines released Monday by the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

The report, "Marketer and Agency Guide to Email Deliverability," aims to cut down on confusion surrounding e-mail deliverability, said David Baker, vice president for e-mail and analytical solutions for Avenue A/Razorfish, and one of the paper's authors. "This document was produced to provide agencies and marketers a layman's view of deliverability without having to go to five different e-mail or deliverability vendors," he said. "We felt that agencies and direct marketers were not being provided unbiased access to information on this subject--nor was it pared down into a simple format that was digestible by the masses."

The white paper cautions marketers to ensure that they know the methodology behind the numbers offered to them by e-mail service providers. "In today's market, it is difficult to differentiate between one source of 'delivery' rates against another," the paper states. "It is not uncommon to see e-mail service providers touting rates as high as 98 and 99 percent."

Rather than looking at deliverability as a single metric, marketers should examine multiple metrics to determine the effectiveness of their campaigns, the paper says. "Deliverability itself is not a metric," it states. "Traditionally, bounce rate was the key delivery metric, but instead of relying solely on bounce rate, you should track your delivery by monitoring the additional delivery metrics provided, as well as standard click, open and conversation performance."