Entice More B2B Offline Customers to Online Relationships

By Stephanie Miller
VP Strategic Services

Since they have a relationship with your company, your existing customers should be the easiest group to entice onto your email list. Yet, many B2B marketers have email addresses for a very small portion of their offline customer base. Why do customers -- even satisfied customers -hesitate to give you permission to email them?

The answer is, we marketers have let them down. A recent survey by Marketing Sherpa shows the very low tolerance business and technology professionals have for irrelevant or uninteresting email. ...

Categories: Acquisition

Hotmail delivery issues? Think Sender Score Certified.

By George Bilbrey
VP & GM Delivery Assurance Solutions

Today's Email Insider column details three steps legit marketers should take to get delivered to Hotmail. It leaves off one of the most obvious -- Return Path's Sender Score Certified. Hotmail - and more than 150K other domains -- use Sender Score Certified as a "safelist" to separate reputable senders from bad ones. If delivery to Hotmail is important to you ...

Categories: Email Deliverability

How to Use Email List Rental to Make Q4 Merry

By Dennis Malaspina
VP, Sales and Client Development

Across the land marketers in every industry are gearing up for their third and fourth quarter efforts. For business-to-business companies the fourth quarter is a time to grab the last of the '06 budget and get themselves into mix for '07. For business-to-consumer companies it's all about hitting the spending trifecta: back-to-school, Halloween and Christmas...

Categories: Acquisition

Getting Good Inc

By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman

Anyway, Return Path was very fortunate to be ranked #167 in this year's Inc. Magazine Inc. 500 list of the fastest growing private companies in America. See the list here and our press release here. We were also happy to see clients of ours like Constant Contact and Zappos on the list, as well as fellow email companies Exact Target, Vertical Response, and research panel Epocrates. That's all the sign of a healthy industry! ...

Categories: News

To Go International, Start Thinking Local

By Ken Takahashi
VP, Corporate Development

Emails cross borders everyday, yet most marketers remain blissfully unaware of this fact. While ignoring your international constituency may not be hurting you (yet! ... or maybe it already is), paying more attention could definitely help your response rates and start to open new, exciting markets.

One note of caution: be sure to work with an attorney who is skilled in overseas laws regarding privacy, data collection and email. Many countries have passed legislation that is very different to what you are used to here in the U.S., so you'll need to understand what is and isn't okay when considering exporting your marketing efforts.

We recommend these 7 steps to start exploring the world beyond U.S. inboxes ...

Categories: Email Deliverability

Permission Question: Can We Email this List?

By Tami Monahan Forman
Director of Strategic Services

We recently got a call from a client (who shall remain nameless, for what will soon be obvious reasons) with a question that we found alarming.

The client who called us is the email manager for his company, acting as a kind of internal agency to a number of departments who want to use email marketing. One such department requested that he put together a "one-time" email for a list they had acquired. ....

Categories: Response

Inc. Magazine Reveals Its 25th Annual List of America's 500 Fastest-Growing Private Companies

Email Performance Management Firm Return Path Ranks No. 167 on the 2006 Inc. 500 With Three-Year Sales Growth of 667.8% 2006 List First to Include Businesses That Started Immediately Before and After 9/11 D.C., NYC, L.A., Boston, and Atlanta Are...Tell me more

Categories: Press Releases

Return Path Scores Top 3 Draft Picks

By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman

This must be what a professional sports team feels like when it finds itself with three picks in the first round of the draft. By adding stars to an already-solid franchise, you can do more, do it faster, and do it better than you were already doing things. Today, Return Path announces the hiring of three email gurus. Each brings a different skill set to the team, each is vitally important to our scalability and success, and each is a well-respected industry leader.

Heather Palmer Goff is moving to Colorado to join us as our VP of Client Management and Deliverability Consulting. Heather, of Responsys fame, will be managing our Sender Score program ....

Categories: News

The Spam Reflex

By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman

You're probably sick to death of us talking about complaints and how they impact your email reputation. At the risk of pushing you over the edge, though, consider the matter from the perspective of the complainers. In a recent Return Path survey, nearly 79% of consumers admitted that they have hit the "spam" or "junk" email button to get rid of email they don't want. And nearly 37% do it as a way to unsubscribe from things they had asked to receive ....

Categories: Response

Hijacking? So not the point

By George Bilbrey
VP & GM Delivery Assurance Solutions

The research brief we released earlier this week on email reputation has created quite a stir -- and not all of it accurate. Stories like the ones here, here, and here report that 97% of email is spam, sent from hijacked computers. This is not necessarily the case. For one, we were not talking about the share of spam out there -- were were talking about the percent of IP addresses likely sending spam. What our research showed is that 97% of IP addresses sending email have terrible reputations. Are they spammers? Most likely. Are they hijacking computers? Maybe. Will they earn inbox delivery? No.

The point of our study is that of those sending high volumes of commercial email, most have terrible Sender Scores (our gauge of reputation) ....

Categories: Email Deliverability