The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and its Email Committee on Monday released the Marketer & Agency Guide to Email Deliverability.

The IAB document (pdf) reviews the definition of email deliverability, discusses how it has changed and considers its impact on marketers. The guide addresses issues such as how to measure, monitor and resolve deliverability issues, enabling agencies and marketers to increase the overall effectiveness of their email marketing efforts.

By some estimates, more than 20 percent of legitimate marketing messages are incorrectly identified as spam by server- and client-level spam filtering. The result for marketers is lower open and click-through rates, fewer conversions, and less revenue.

"The Marketer and Agency Guide to Deliverability is the first comprehensive document that provides marketers with real tangible solutions to improving their email deliverability," said Craig Swerdloff, General Manager, Customer Acquisition Programs at Return Path and IAB Email Committee Chair.

"Providing the marketers with a single standard definition of deliverability as well as accurate and timely information around causes of delivery problems and measurement is an extremely important step in solidifying email as a critical performance marketing vehicle."