Hotmail Images and Links Automatically Enabled for Sender Score Certified Email

By George Bilbrey
VP & GM Delivery Assurance Solutions

It's not easy to be a big ISP these days. Consumers expect to be protected from unwanted email and from images that might offend them or link that might be dangerous. Marketers, meanwhile, complain about their permission-based messages that end up in the bulk folder or get mangled beyond comprehension by image suppression.

Microsoft is now offering a way for best-practices email marketers to bypass image suppression and be sure their images show and their links work, automatically. They have decided that users of Sender Score Certified will have images and links enabled by default when sending to Windows Live Hotmail. Because companies accredited by Sender Score Certified meet such high email standards, Microsoft knows that their subscribers will be safe with this decision.

We are obviously excited about this - it offers a huge new benefit to our certified senders and gives even more reason for senders to apply to be certified.

Why are the inclusion of images and links important? ...

Categories: Email Deliverability

The Myth of the Magic Email Frequency

By Margaret Farmakis
Director, Strategic Services

How often should marketers send email to their subscribers?

According to Chad White at the Email Experience Council (eec), that depends to some extent on the industry norm. He compiled frequency data for 92 major retailers over 16 weeks and found that the average number of touches is 1.7 per week.

What's a marketer to do if you fall above or below the industry average? The knee-jerk reaction is to submit to the peer pressure of your industry's frequency statistics and fall in line accordingly. But will that really make a difference when it comes to response? ...

Categories: Response

Great Resource for Email Designers

By Dan Deneweth
Director, Product Management

Earlier this year we wrote a blog posting detailing the design challenges posed by the release of Outlook 2007. In that post we detailed how Outlook 2007 does not support dozens of CSS elements that previous Outlook versions support - a huge issue for anyone involved with designing email.

Well, our friends at CampaignMonitor have taken that idea a step further and put together a comprehensive PDF that lists the major email readers and what CSS elements they do, or don't, support.

On a related note ...

Categories: Email Deliverability

Permission Encore: No Reason Not to Verify

By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman

With a series of three consecutive, semi-organized blog postings (here, here and here), Stephanie, Neil, and I have sparked some debate about permission in email marketing. It even prompted Mark Brownlow to cross post and refer to our hallowed halls here at Return Path. Taken together, I think the posts make a powerful point:

Permission to use an email address is not permanent and all-encompassing; it probably has no bearing whatsoever on whether or not your emails get delivered; but it's still a good foundation for a successful email program, especially up-front.

Yesterday, I spoke at the DM Days conference here in New York about deliverability and reputation and was asked some more tactical questions about permission that bear repeating here in another sequel to our earlier postings. ...

Categories: Email Deliverability

Is opt-in permission really enough?

By Neil Schwartzman
Manager, Compliance and ISP Relations

My colleague Stephanie Miller recently posted asking the question "Is permission enough?" A good question! But it begs the question: When it comes to email, what is permission?

For some time now I have contended that confirmed cpt-in, also known as COI, is dead, or at the very least on life support. It certainly is not a major factor in the continued relation between sender and receiver; that relies far more heavily on the ongoing and historical reputation of the mailer and the mail stream. Proof of permission doesn't scale, and is hard to retain.

But then, in my capacity as Executive Director of the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email (CAUCE), I recently had two eye-opening experiences as to exactly why confirmed (or, if you prefer, double) opt-in is critical to the whole email equation. ...

Categories: Email Deliverability

Is Permission Still Relevant?

By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman

My colleague Stephanie Miller wrote a great post last week titled Is Permission Enough? The essence of her argument is:

...permission is not forever...Subscribers opt in and then promptly forget about their actions...Nor is permission a panacea. Opt-in doesn't replace relevancy and keeping your promises.

And she goes on to give great examples of how marketers abuse permission and a great checklist of times marketers shouldn't assume permission, which is where the trouble starts.

So I concur -- permission is never enough from a sender's perspective. But you still have to have it. Why? Read on. ...

Categories: Email Deliverability

Is Permission Enough?

By Stephanie Miller
VP of Strategic Services

I spoke at both INBOX and Internet Retailer recently, and at both events heard smart marketers ask, "Why do readers unsubscribe, ignore or complain about my emails? They opted-in!"

The answer is that permission is not forever. Subscribers opt in and then promptly forget about their actions. Many marketers are not clear about what they will be sending, or at what frequency. That disconnect is real -- in fact, it's not unusual to see a high number of complaints and unsubscribes on a Welcome Message.

Nor is permission a panacea. Opt-in doesn't replace relevancy and keeping your promises.

To that end, here are a few key moments in the subscriber experience when permission should NOT be assumed ...

Categories: Response

MAAWG Best Practices: Where to Focus Your Attention

By George Bilbrey
VP & GM Delivery Assurance Solutions

My colleague Neil Swartzman wrote a great post announcing the new MAAWG Sender Communication Best Practices which Return Path wholeheartedly endorses.

As Neil recommends, you and your team should definitely take the time to review the whole document and discuss how you can implement the practices. But we also understand that it can be hard to find the time, so we wanted to give you a quick and dirty rundown of the top six areas to focus on ...

Categories: Email Deliverability

A New (Old) Marketing Blog

By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman

Andy Sernovitz's very cleverly-named Damn, I Wish I'd Thought of That is back, this time in blog and RSS feed format as well as, of course, email newsletter format. Andy is a Return Path alum and does a great job of crystallizing smart and clever ideas for marketers into manageable nuggets, particularly around viral and word-of-mouth marketing (Andy wrote a great book on WOM marketing, which I reviewed on my personal blog).

He was nice enough to interview me for his blog. As a teaser, Andy asked me (and a bunch of other people) three questions ...

Categories: News

DomainKeys Identified Email Becomes Standard

By Robert Barclay
Senior Product Manager

The Internet Engineering Task Force has approved DomainKeys Identified Email (commonly known as DKIM) as a technical standard for email. This clears the way for emailers to implement DKIM and for ISPs to potentially use it to either block or allow email through its system.

We actually think this is great news. It means that DKIM will eventually become the replacement to DomainKeys (DK) as the primary cryptographic-based authentication standard. DKIM has some great advantages over DK, but for my money the biggest one is "third party signing," meaning it allows a domain other than the "From:" domain to sign the messages. There are many cases where the person sending the mail doesn't control the "From:" domain. Third party signing solves that problem, and as a result makes it much more likely that large companies can sign all their mail, even when outsourced to an ESP.

So what's a mailer to do? ...

Categories: Email Deliverability