The Interactive Advertising Bureau announced the release of "Email Data Management Best Practices" to provide publishers, marketers and service providers with a set of privacy and security recommendations.

“If our industry adheres to these vital recommendations, we will have succeeded in removing some of the major friction points of email marketing, which in turn will greatly contribute to the medium’s continued growth as an effective means of one-on-one engagement with consumers,” said Arend Henderson, Chief Analytics Officer of Q Interactive and a member of the IAB’s Email Committee.

The four key recommendations from the IAB on email data management include:

• Senders should send commercial email only to individuals who have provided informed consent.
• A global unsubscribe mechanism should be implemented for all companies sending emails.
• Advertisers and marketers should authenticate their emails by publicly registering the domains from which they send the email.
• A company cannot transfer a consumer’s permission to receive commercial email to another company without the transfer being referenced in the new company’s emails.

“We are confident that, if adopted, these best practices will protect consumers by ensuring that consent is informed and retractable, and will help responsible email marketers and their service providers improve the overall quality and performance of email marketing campaigns,” said Randall Rothenberg, president and CEO of the IAB. “We created this document with a very important goal in mind—to codify the elements of security, deliverability, permission and privacy for all companies involved in email marketing,” said Jeremy Fain, Vice President of Industry Services for the IAB and the lead of the IAB’s Email Committee.