IAB issues best practice guidelines

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has issued its Email Data Management Best Practices - a list of privacy and data security guidelines for marketers and other industry professionals.

As part of the guidelines, marketers are advised to send commercial email only to people who have opted in to receive content and to always provide information about how to unsubscribe.

Where possible, marketers where also advised to allow users to be able to unsubscribe through web-based or email-based mechanisms.

The best practice guidelines also recommend that advertisers and marketers should authenticate their email by publicly registering the domains that their mailings come from.

Randall Rothenberg, chief executive of the IAB, said: “We are confident that if adopted, these best practices will protect consumers by ensuring that consent is informed and retractable.”

He added that the guidelines will also help responsible email marketers and their service providers improve the overall quality and performance of email marketing campaigns.