Email Marketing Secrets

By Stephanie Miller
VP of Strategic Services

The secret to high return email marketing is that there is no secret. There is only one way to drive higher revenue and deliverability is to create compelling subscriber experiences.

And it's important to remember that email subscriber experiences don't happen in a vacuum. Our subscribers are also our prospects and customers and interact with us in many channels outside of email.

I spoke this week about great email marketing in a presentation titled, "Seven Email Marketing Secrets" at the newly revamped and rather fabulous Interactive Marketing Expo (produced by the Chicago Association of Direct Marketing). One thing that really stands out when you meet with direct marketers is that email and mobile marketing are embraced as important and fascinating channels, but are not the drivers of the direct marketing mix. I spend so much time talking about email marketing with email marketers, that it's refreshing to get out of the echo chamber and talk about email with folks who do direct or interactive marketing and dig in to why email can be such an important part of a multichannel approach.

This is, of course, the strategy that every successful email marketer takes. ...

Categories: Response

Drawing the Line

By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman

We are having a bit of a debate at the moment internally around our Sender Score deliverability business about how to handle clients who are in businesses that are, shall we say, not exactly as pure as the driven snow.  As a company that provides software and services to businesses without a vertical focus, we are often approached by all sorts of companies wanting our services where we don't love what they do.  Examples include:

• Gambling
  
• Tobacco
  
• Neutriceuticals
  
• Guns
  
• Adult content or products

Our challenges are along three dimensions, each of which is a little different.  But common threads run through all three dimensions. 

Categories: Email Deliverability

Partner Case Study: Deliverability Win at Blue Sky Factory

By Ken Takahashi
VP, Corporate and International Development

Kudos to our friends over at Blue Sky Factory. They have been using our Sender Score suite of tools for their clients for some time now, and they are starting to see some real results. In fact, they just published a case study of their work with Caribbean Tours & Cruises.

Travel marketing can be tricky in the age of spam. Many of the words they would normally use in their content gets flagged by filters. The use of images - crucially important in making recipients long for that beach getaway - can get blocked and make emails unreadable. ...

Categories: Email Deliverability

Rocky Mountain High

By Anita Absey
SVP, Sales & Marketing

Last month we took our best email experts and hit the road to bring fresh, new marketing ideas to San Francisco and Los Angeles. This month we embark on the next leg of the tour.

Next stop is the Mile High City on May 27. Not only will you learn best practices from our expert team of Return Pathers, but you will get first hand knowledge and advice from other email marketers just like you. On tap for Denver, are email marketers from Memolink, Shop at Home, Sierra Trading Post and LifePics who will share their experiences on how they cope with everyday email challenges to drive revenue for their businesses. Best of all, it's a great opportunity for you to get your specific questions answered one-on-one during our email expert roundtables.

Categories: Response

Ad:Tech Report: Predictions on the Future of Online Advertising

By Craig Swerdloff
VP and GM of Customer Acquisition Solutions

While Ad:Tech was a lively show this year - it was not quite as mobbed as it had been the last few years. You can make your own assumptions about the cause, but for me it is evidence that the marketing budgets of advertising services companies are tightening.

But what is not totally clear is, why. Are recession fears driving reduced revenue expectations for these advertising services companies? Or has the ridiculous number of conferences, seminars, and events finally reached an inflection point? My guess is both. But I am not-so-secretly hoping that we have reached a point where the industry cannot support this many events. My family is openly cheering for it.

Aside from a decline in sponsorship and attendance, here are a few trends we saw last week and predictions for next year ...

Categories: Acquisition

Let the Phone Gather Dust; Brush off the Spreadsheet Instead

By Stephanie Miller
VP of Strategic Services

"What's all the fuss about?" A marketer asked me the other day during an industry event. When you generally follow best practices for deliverability, she said, you usually can get into the inbox. Then, if a big block does occur, you just call Return Path to get it lifted. "There is enough wiggle room, right?"

Um, no. Not really.

Our smart client Nathan Murphy at Classmates.com got it right when he said the other day, "If I do my job well, I should never be in the position of having to contact an ISP because of a delivery problem. I feel that some people in the industry view email delivery as a reactive role and not preventative."

Can Return Path get blocks lifted for our clients because we know their practices and program integrity and feel comfortable representing them?

Categories: Email Deliverability

Incentive Testing for Fun and Profit

By Dennis Malaspina
VP, Sales and Client Development

MarketingExperiments just published two fascinating case studies on the use of incentives to drive email capture and free trial conversion.

Incentives have a mixed history in the annals of interactive marketing. The truth is, they work. And, as MarketingExperiments shows, when they are optimized they work really well. But they have been abused by some marketers and, if used poorly, can actually degrade performance.

That said, you gotta read this report now. It's really fascinating.

Categories: Acquisition

Court Affirms Comcast's Right to Keep Inboxes Safe from Spam

By J.D. Falk
Director of Product Management, Receiver Products

This week the industry is, once again, abuzz with talk of the e360 lawsuit against Comcast. e360 was attempting to use the federal courts to force Comcast to accept unwanted mail, and the judge has ruled on the case. As email technology guru John Levine wrote on Friday morning, "it's a fun read."

Here at Return Path, I read Judge Zagel's order twice: first from an anti-spam perspective, and then again thinking about how it might affect our clients. Some marketers will surely find reasons to fear this judgement - but they shouldn't. This is good for them, too - because by protecting the ISPs' good-faith efforts to protect their users from objectionable email, Judge Zagel is protecting the inbox against the really bad stuff. Inboxes that are filled with scams, spams, and things that look like they might be scams or spams, are simply unusable. The only way for people to be able to find, read, and respond to the messages they want to receive is for the inbox to be free of the junk they don't want to receive.

Marketers who follow best practices, who respect their subscribers, and who (to put it simply) follow all the other advice we give, can and should continue to do what you've been doing. You'll get to the inbox, just like today. ...

Categories: Email Deliverability

Focus on Subscriber Experience: Learning a Lesson from Evite

By Stephanie Colleton
Director, Strategic Services

This past Sunday the New York Times Magazine ran a column by Virginia Heffernan ranting about Evite. Her complaints about the party-planning service were many, but one sentence really jumped out at me:

"And why, for the love of both partying and efficiency, aren't the details of an event -- the time and place -- in the subject line or at least the email itself?"

The reason, according to Heffernan's column, is that Evite wants to drive page views, which translate into ad dollars, by forcing recipients to click through to the party details page. In this case, what's good for the business isn't good for the consumer. ...

Categories: Response

Pulling the Trigger on Trigger-Based Campaigns

By Bonnie Malone Fry
Director, Strategic Services

As every marketer continues on the quest for higher response and ROI, triggered campaigns centered around website behaviors (previous purchases, abandoned carts, browse history, etc) are becoming more and more popular due to their high subscriber relevancy and response. However, in the whirlwind to implement such high impact programs, it's easy to lose focus on the subscriber experience. To truly optimize results, and foster your relationship with the subscriber, keep these three tips in mind ...

Categories: Response