A Brief History of Deliverability

For most email marketers today, “deliverability” is a commonly used term. But this hasn’t always been the case. Over the past 10 years, the use of email has increased and subsequently, more and more inboxes were flooded with unwanted messages. In order to defeat spammers across the board, ISP’s implemented complex filters on arriving emails to block potential SPAM. In it’s infancy stages, information on ISP filtering was not made public. Additionally, many legitimate emails were marked as SPAM, which sent them straight to the Junk Folder or weren’t delivered at all. The influx of filtering resulted in lower open rates, lower response rates and lower conversion rates for all email marketers.

The ongoing inconsistencies of SPAM filtering lead to the birth of “deliverability” in 2003. Since then, this issue has started to stabilize through federal legislations and the implementation of various authentication technologies. As it stands now, deliverability is a market within the email industry with its own experts, consultants and the like.

For further information on deliverability download this document created by the Interactive Advertising Bureau.