Keeping the World Safe For Email (part one)

By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman

Since we put up our new web site with the above as its new tag line a couple months ago, a bunch of people have asked me what the heck it means. Some have even snickered when doing so. Why do we want a world that's safe for email marketing? Doesn't that mean just promulgating the spam problem?

First, I have to define my terms here. SAFE in this context means that you as a user (a consumer, a business person, whatever) have a right to an inbox free of unwanted commercial, irrelevant commercial mail, scams, and viruses. EMAIL MARKETING doesn't just mean advertising. It means most any mail you get from an organization. Newsletters. Transactional messaging like eStatements and shipping confirmations. Customer service notices. And yes, advertising that's relevant, targeted, and that you've requested.

So putting it all together in the context of our business, we at Return Path are doing our part to Keep the World Safe for Email Marketing. We work with our clients - some advertisers, some publishers, some email service providers, some ISPs and spam filters, some market researchers - to make sure each is doing its part to further the same mission, whether they use our tools, our data, our professional services, or just our free advice to do so.

We as a society have embraced email as a medium, and by doing so, we have put our trust in its effectiveness. Although we sometimes have a love/hate relationship with email, we require it to survive in a world that always wants to be connected. It's at the core of most global business communications. It's increasingly at the core of most personal communications as well.

What email must (and will) do is evolve. This evolution will allow us to experience the true power of the channel no matter where we reside in the email chain. But this will only happen if we obtain consumer trust above and beyond its current state. So the real question here is how can we work together to help consumers trust this medium more?

Find out in part 2 of Keeping the World Safe For Email.