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

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

Trust in Email Begins with Authentication

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

Unfortunately, forging From: or other commonly seen email headers is trivially easy. It's one of the most frustrating oversights in the creation of internet email technology -- though of course that's only obvious in hindsight; it was just fine for the pre-internet networks of the late 1970s and early-mid 1980s.

Since then, things have changed -- and the most interesting recent technological advancements in email have been in the realm of sender authentication, which encompasses ways to verify that the apparent sender of a message actually is the entity which sent it. Before you can answer the question "can I trust this message?," you first have to ask "who sent it?" -- but before authentication, there was often no way to know for sure.

Categories: Email Deliverability

Get Fresh, New Email Ideas: Expert Seminars

By Anita Absey
SVP, Sales & Marketing

So you are sitting at your desk, staring at your email promotion calendar thinking "Is there a single new idea left in the world? What do my subscribers really want? What are the newest rules for getting to the inbox? What are other marketers doing to get out of the rut?"

If this describes you, then you need to come to Return Path's Email Expert Seminars . The smartest minds in email today will be on hand to give you a fresh perspective on email. You'll view the world from the perspectives of subscribers, ISPs and your fellow marketers. You'll also get a fresh perspective on email acquisition and learn some bold new ways to apply those same old best practices.

Our experts are coming to ...

Categories: Acquisition | Email Deliverability | Response

JupiterResearch: Marketers Focus on the Wrong Stuff?

By Ken Takahashi
VP, Corporate and International Development

As many readers of this blog will no doubt already know, the JupiterResearch report on ESPs that was released this month found that 70% of marketers rank "deliverability" as their number one priority when selecting an email service provider. While we applaud marketer's attention to deliverability issues, it seems to us that their focus has been placed slightly in the wrong direction. As I've written before, ESPs cannot solve all deliverability problems for email marketers. Moreover, there is very little difference between the major players on the pieces that the ESP can control. Basically, you can stop worrying about whether or not your ESP can get the email through. They do a good job.

Categories: Email Deliverability

Worried About Deliverability? Focus on Relevance

By Stephanie Miller
VP of Strategic Services

Whenever I sit down to write about relevance, I find myself thinking "Is this a new idea? Don't marketers already know this? They must get the basics by now, right?"

Unfortunately, the answer appears to be a resounding "No!" Last week JupiterResearch released its 2008 Email Marketer's Buyers Guide and, as Direct Magazine columnist Ken Magill points out, the news isn't very good. The top criteria marketers use when choosing an ESP are deliverability and price. That is good news - as deliverability is the single most contributing factor to earning higher revenue. And keeping costs down also helps the bottom line.

However, as the report itself points out, looking to your ESP to solve your deliverability is completely misplaced.

Categories: Email Deliverability

Why Does Return Path Spend So Much Time Working Within Industry Organizations?

By George Bilbrey
VP & GM Delivery Assurance Solutions

That answer is simple. Because we love email and are committed to preserving and enriching the email ecosystem for everyone who uses it (except the bad guys.) There is a lot of coordination required if senders, receivers, and end users are to withstand the assault on email by the "axis of evil" - spammers, phishers, and other fraudsters that are polluting our email ecosystem. As champions of the email space, we have dedicated a lot of time and energy into supporting the online community and committing resources to making email work for everyone.

Return Path is proud to serve in the following capacities:

Categories: Email Deliverability

What Do You Really Know About Your Inbox Deliverability?

By Chad Malchow
VP, New Business Development

I had the pleasure of attending Marketing Sherpa's Email Summit this week where I had the unique opportunity to network and gain valuable insight from savvy email marketers who openly shared their experiences, talked about their obstacles and raved about their successes. I am sure most of you read Marketing' Sherpa's summary report of their recent email summit. While I agree with most of the commentary, I was a little taken aback by the notion that deliverability is no longer a big topic and subsequently, not a big issue.

I am certainly not saying that relevancy is not important, or is search, or segmentation, social media, etc. I guess the word I would use is "relative," not "relevance." My point is, when you send an email message, your expectation is that it will be delivered to the intended recipient with the messaging you created. Much like print, television, word of mouth and radio, email is a prime communication channel that, for direct marketers, is intended to drive a response. If the message is not delivered, then the effort is futile.

Categories: Email Deliverability

Authentication, Reputation & Accreditation: The Three Pillars of Email Deliverability

By Leslie Price
Senior Product Manager, Accreditation and Consulting Services

Here at Return Path, we're constantly thinking & talking about reputation, authentication, and accreditation as the best way to achieve maximum deliverability. These three elements work in tandem to help ISPs better identify and ascertain whether the mail you send should reach the inbox of their subscribers.

With spam, phishing and spoofing proliferating the internet airwaves, delivery rates for legitimate marketers have been compromised. As a result, marketers must take extra steps to ensure the success of their email programs by differentiating themselves from the fraudsters and spammers. To do so, they should integrate these three methods into their overall email strategy to achieve campaign success.

Categories: Email Deliverability

New Sender Score Features Arm Marketers with Enhanced Data to Make Smarter Decisions about their Email Campaigns

By George Bilbrey
VP & GM Delivery Assurance Solutions

In our quest to make your job easier, we have poked, prodded and tweaked our tool set to make our incredibly rich deliverability data even more meaningful and actionable. Today we added four new features to the Sender Score suite. These enhancements offer new ways to analyze and review data so you can better monitor and diagnose your deliverability situation, enhance your sending reputation, and minimize or prevent future blocking, filtering, and rendering issues.

Here's what we've added:

Categories: Email Deliverability