What is the EEC (Email Experience Council)?
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If you've heard of EEC and wondered how it fits alongside groups like M3AAWG or the DMA, the short answer is that EEC sits firmly on the marketing side of email rather than the technical or anti-abuse side.
The Email Experience Council (EEC) is a council within the Association of National Advertisers (ANA). It focuses on email as a marketing channel, meaning its audience is primarily brand marketers, email strategists, and campaign managers, not postmasters or deliverability engineers.
What you'll find through EEC includes benchmarking studies, email marketing guides, working groups, and webinars. The benchmarking reports are probably the most useful thing for practitioners. They give you real performance numbers to compare your open rates, click rates, and unsubscribe rates against others in your industry (which is harder to find than it sounds).
EEC membership comes through ANA, so it's typically used by brands and agencies rather than individual freelancers. That said, a lot of their research gets referenced publicly even outside the paywall.
Where EEC differs from other email bodies is in its focus. M3AAWG is about fighting abuse and improving infrastructure. The DMA is rooted in data and privacy regulation. EEC is squarely about making email marketing work better as a channel. Think strategy and performance, not authentication and blocklists.
If you're a marketer who wants industry benchmarks and peer conversations with other brand-side email people, EEC is worth knowing about. If you're deep in deliverability infrastructure, it's less directly relevant (though the benchmarks still matter).
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