White Papers

Here is a library of resources published by email industry leaders, vetted and maintained by the Deliverability team for 14 West’s clients.

• The Ultimate Guide to Email Deliverability from SparkPost and Litmus

  • A comprehensive look at email deliverability, why it matters, and how to be successful.

• WTF is Email Deliverability? from Validity and Digiday

  • “This report aims to help marketers understand the essential elements of deliverability, highlighting the main blockers of email success. The key to successful email campaigns will turn on understanding the difference between delivery versus deliverability, so marketers can maximize budget, time and energy spent on email marketing. That way, their campaigns will deliver for their businesses, one inbox at a time.”

• Clueing in on List Hygiene: Catch the Culprit of Poor Email Performance from Validity

  • Validity takes a deep dive into a variety of list hygiene issues that could be affecting your mail. List hygiene is a process of data validation that ensures your email list is comprised of valid and positively engaged subscribers and plays a big role in determining whether your emails make it to the inbox.
    If your list isn’t clean, it can significantly lower your deliverability and have deadly consequences on your email performance.

• Spamhaus Knowhow: Email Delivery 101 from Spamhaus

  • “Deliverability is now about the quality of the mail stream rather than an Email Service Provider's (ESP) ability to sweet talk an Internet Software Provider (ISP) into allowing their IP. Over the years, big data has enabled ISP and filter vendors to measure more things about email than we can imagine; literally, thousands of heuristics are taken into account for each decision made. […]
    ”Meticulously adhering to email best practices will lead to excellent IP address and domain reputation, and consequently excellent email reputation. Consider this to be your ultimate goal. Marketers should repeat this as a mantra: Excellent reputation is key to successful delivery.”

• Email in 2022 from SparkPost

  • “First, we highlight the trends and topics that we believe will be top of mind for email professionals this year. Then, we closely examine how email and marketing professionals have adjusted two years into the pandemic (a global surveys of 224 email practitioners and 2,000 marketing leaders), and what digital marketing strategies they’ve leaned on to accelerate growth and connection with key audiences. Lastly, we examine email benchmark metrics and how they’ve shifted over the last year. For this we sifted through mountains of data that was based on the largest data network of any email solutions provider, not just in terms of overall data points, but in the depth and diversity of the sources we pull from.”

• State of Email 2022: Mastering the New Email Landscape from Validity

  • “This report harnesses the full power of the Validity global data network, which pulls data from 2.5 billion mailboxes around the world. Here’s what to expect: 1) An analysis of global email performance in 2021 (and 2020 when relevant) across nine major performance indicators, 2) Expert forecasts for what’s coming to the world of email in 2022, 3) Actionable tips for senders to get ahead of the game.”

• The Email Metrics Survival Guide (2022) from Litmus

  • Evolving email capabilities like personalization and dynamic content, privacy changes, and the looming end of third-party cookies are changing how marketers approach their email marketing strategy—and how they measure campaigns. Litmus created this guide to help you do just that.

• The Mail Privacy Protection Survival Guide for Marketers from Litmus

  • “The email industry is constantly evolving. And it’s because of email’s challenges—like the lack of universal email development standards—that we’ve been able to innovate and shine. We now have a much better idea of how Mail Privacy Protection will work—and more importantly, how it’ll affect email marketers. In this survival guide, we’ll walk you through: 1) What Mail Privacy Protection is and how it’ll work, 2) The impact on email marketing programs, 3) A step-by-step action plan to prepare now.”

• 2021 State of Email Engagement from Litmus

  • Summary: “In this report, we analyzed almost 8 billion email opens, anonymously collected and aggregated with Litmus Email Analytics from January 1 - August 31, 2021. We include worldwide trends for all industries and verticals. Some email clients may be over- or under-represented, particularly with mobile and webmail. This is due to image blocking or image caching, most notably with Gmail. Use this report to understand current email trends, as a benchmark for your own program, and for ideas to leverage these insights to inform your email program strategy.”