The Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) UK has released its 2013 Email Handbook – ‘Email: Joining the Digital Dots’, sponsored by Return Path. The guide brings together expert inputs from IAB Email Council members, including myself in my role as Chairman of the IAB Email Council, and author of the chapters on data and deliverability, as well as measurement & reporting

The publishing of this document is particularly timely. Every now and then we see yet another article predicting the imminent demise...

The run-up to Easter is a time when email marketing activity shows a distinct seasonal spike. This is fully expected from the chocolate companies, but actually brands from every sector imaginable jump on the bandwagon. Over the past few days, I have seen Easter-themed promotions from voucher code aggregators, restaurants, hardware stores, jewellers, retailers, financial comparison websites, and travel companies.

The challenge for these senders during these periods is they have all had the same...

The consultation period for proposed changes to the European Data Protection Regulations now has only 4 months to run. I wrote on the potential impact of these proposals previously, demonstrating that in Europe Direct Marketing stands to lose approximately £350 billion per annum if implemented.

Despite efforts to raise awareness, as an industry we still appear to be sleepwalking toward disaster. In recent research by DMA (UK) 60% of senior managers at brand, agencies and suppliers responded...

In his recent Predictions & Unpredictions for 2013 blog post, our CEO Matt Blumberg talked about how brands’ marketing and security functions will need to join forces to fight phishing. One key reason is that phishers and spoofers are continually getting smarter, applying an impressive range of best practices to make their emails ever-more compelling and believable.

Consider this example that I received recently from “Yorkshire Building Society” (YBS):

It is highly effective because:

• The subject...

It was Benjamin Franklin who said "The only things certain in life are death and taxes." If he had worked in our industry, he might have added “spam complaints” to that sentence as well! As Return Path’s recently released Email Intelligence Report highlighted, “This is Spam” has clearly become a shortcut to being removed from an email program.

Spam complaints are reflected in a program’s sender reputation metrics, and impact negatively on Inbox Placement Rates as a result. They also provide an...