Summer Lovin': Acquire New Customers Now

By Evan Adlman
Director, Business Operations

Summer is almost here. Time to roll out some summer campaign ideas.
Executing a lead generation campaign capturing email addresses while most folks are out enjoying sun and sand can be a challenge. But it's a lot easier if you use the season to your advantage. What types of content could you offer to make people give you a few minutes of time and fill out a form?

Print and color pages: It might seem quaint with some many minivans sporting the multiple DVD players, but some good off-screen fun can also help keep kids occupied during long car trips this summer. Offer harried parents a quick and easy download experience and promise more pages for back to school, Halloween and the holidays. ...

Categories: Acquisition

What Do Women Want? Email and Chocolate

By Margaret Farmakis
Director, Strategic Services

According to a recent study by BlogHer and Compass Partners, 36.2 million women are participating in a blog every week: 15.1 million are publishing and 21.2 million are reading and commenting. Perhaps even more interesting, the women that took part in the study said they would give up alcohol (55%), their PDAs (50%) and reading newspapers or magazines (43%) in order to keep writing and reading blogs. Their dedication had limits, however: 80% of the women surveyed refused to give up chocolate.

So, other than the fact that the confections industry can breathe a sigh of relief, what does this mean for email? Marketers, take note: Women online have purchasing power. The study found that the women who are engaged with blogging are educated (57% graduated from college) and well paid (46% earn $75K or more). These women could very well be your most active, responsive and engaged subscriber segments. How can you serve them better? Consider these three ideas ...

Categories: Response

Drawing the Line: Where We Come out

By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman

In the first post in this series, I laid out a dilemma we've had internally at Return Path in recent months: whether and how we accept clients who are in "grey" businesses like alcohol, pornography, and neutriceuticals, and whether that applies uniformly across all of our products (software vs. consulting vs. whitelist). In the second post, I reposted a summary of all the comments we received from readers. Now comes the fun part -- the so what.

We had a good series of conversations internally on this issue that included some very spirited debate. Here's where we come out.

First, we drew a distinction between three types of potentially "troublesome" clients: those whose businesses are illegal, or who advertise or sell illegal products; those whose businesses are involved in litigation around email, data, privacy, or security; and those whose businesses are in the grey area, or what we called in our discussions "morally hazardous." In the end, we decided ...

Categories: Deliverability

Marketing to Mom

By Bonnie Malone Fry
Director, Strategic Services

With Mother's Day coming this weekend, I've been thinking a lot about "Mommy marketing." Pregnancy, childbirth and new parenthood offer a predictable set of challenges that makes this audience a natural for lifecycle marketing. And, are you surprised to hear us say this, a natural for email.

A colleague of mine recently had a baby and she was struck by how many companies spent a lot of money purchasing her name and then sending her direct mail - including samples! - but didn't build in an email component.

Let's take a look at a few of the big companies, what they did and what they could have done better

Categories: Response