Deliverability 3.0

An article in eMarketer this week documents what I'd call "Television 3.0", where we consume video when and where we want it across 3 screens (the tube, our computer screens, our smart phones), instead of just one.

In the good old days (as in only 3 or 4 years ago), understanding "deliverability" involved figuring out how to get email from the sender to a recipient's inbox on his/her personal computer—pretty straightforward.  But fast forward to where we are today:

• People can read email on television sets. (Today, it's mostly from hotels, but that will change).
• People read email on mobile devices. (Increasingly on smart phones, which are rapidly gaining market share).
• Emails are read through RSS readers
• Emails are re-posted to social networks and blogs, and are forwarded along to friends and colleagues using dozens, hundreds and thousands of different ISPs.
• Search engines index emails
• Oh, right, and then there's good old fashioned software and web-based email clients, which consumers still use and love more than ever.

What does this mean? It means that understanding deliverability has become a lot more complicated, and has gotten a lot more interesting. 

Maximizing email results requires the adoption of a new practice, "Deliverability 3.0", where marketers must follow, understand and optimize the path of their communication not just from the sender to the recipient, but from sender, to recipient, to other recipients, across a wide and growing variety of platforms.  

-Jordan Cohen