Jan
18
By George Bilbrey
VP & GM Delivery Assurance Solutions
We waited a little while to make sure that 2007 was really and truly over before noting the interesting trends for the year. With a fair degree of certainty we can predict that 2007 won't return. After polling some of the smarter folks about deliverability at Return Path, here are some of the trends that we found interesting over the last year and what we think will happen in '08.
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
Jan
04
By J.D. Falk
Director of Product Management, Receiver Products
I've always maintained that spam does not make one great, but Al Ralsky kept a relatively high profile for long enough that his unwelcome intrusions into our inboxes - and our friends' inboxes, and our parents' inboxes, and our children's inboxes - will be long remembered.
Today the entire email industry is cheering the arrest and indictment of Ralsky and his gang, which was reported in the Detroit Free Press this morning. It's obviously good news for anti-spammers, who have been clamoring for prosecutions of illegal spamming activity for more than a decade. But it's also wonderful news for the email marketing industry, which has been trying to show the world that they aren't spammers. Now, the marketers can point to Ralsky's illegal activities and state with one voice: "we do not do these awful things."
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
Dec
03
By Tom Sather
Email Deliverability Consultant
The holiday season is here and the gloves are off. Competition for inbox placement and subscriber activity will be stiff as marketers vying for consumer dollars will increase both the volume and frequency of their special offers. To cope with the increase of email traffic, many marketers have decided to add new IP addresses to handle the load. But marketer beware! Some of the top ISPs are putting new IP addresses with no sending history on a short leash until they can gather enough reputational data to determine how to deliver the email. In order to establish a reputation on a new IP address, you will have to do the following:
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
Nov
27
By Ken Takahashi
VP, Corporate and International Development
Return Path's has always been a pioneer in deliverability performance. As the industry's first email deliverability monitoring service, Return Path has remained at the forefront of email innovation since its launch in 1999.
Today, Return Path lends that same knowledge and expertise to the European market. With over 150 local ISPs who speak different languages, ESPs face challenges that are difficult to tackle independently without multi-lingual support and international relationships. What we found was that global marketers needed a deliverability "go-between" to help them efficiently manage overseas marketing campaigns with the same gusto and expertise available in the U.S. In response, Return Path launched the Sender Score Receiver Alliance with three charter members, e-Dialog, eCircle, and 1000mercis. Today, we are proud to announce the addition of our four newest members - Splio Développement, The Communicator Corp, IPT and Responsys.
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
Nov
15
By Ken Takahashi
VP, Corporate and International Development
After attending the recent MAAWG conference, I traveled to Europe where I spent much of my time with a variety of email service providers (ESPs) discussing the current market conditions and where they saw opportunities moving forward. On my flight home, I realized that there was one resonating theme around my conversations. Almost all of the ESPs I spoke with had significant concerns around supporting the portion of their client base that cause the most deliverability issues. It made me realize that the email deployment industry is setting their pricing policies all wrong.
For years, people have commented on (some might say complained about) the industry use of a CPM pricing model even though the ESP costs are roughly the same whether your campaigns are sent to 1,000 or 100,000 people. Whether or not you agree with this model on principle, it's clear to me that this is causing a problem now that many ESPs bundling their deliverability services as part of this CPM. Here is what's wrong with this picture...
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
Nov
13
By George Bilbrey
VP & GM Delivery Assurance Solutions
On your daily commute, during your lunch hour or even between meetings, what is it that you see people doing other than reading the paper or drinking a hot cup of coffee? Checking email - and not on their laptops, but rather on their handheld mobile devices. In fact, the adoption of Blackberrys spawned the term "crackberry" to describe this rapidly spreading addiction that has essentially sparked a cultural change in how people communicate.
As a result, this "always on" medium has become a very attractive channel for savvy marketers. However, it poses the same rendering challenges we face in traditional email with the added complexity of operational and device differentiators that are beyond a marketer's control. Given that, how can you design your email campaigns effectively for mobile? Use Sender Score Campaign Preview.
Today, I am very pleased to announce that your mobile worries are over! Return Path has launched the first ever email rendering solution for mobile devices. Our Sender Score Campaign Preview tool will now allow marketers to see exactly what their email campaigns will look like on Windows Mobile 5 and 6 and Blackberry devices.
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
Oct
15
By J.D. Falk
Director of Product Management, Receiver Products
I've been working on email for more than a decade, and I've met a lot of people from all sides of the industry. When working on Yahoo! Mail and before that on Microsoft's MSN Hotmail, I was very popular at industry conferences. People would interrupt each other to introduce themselves, seek out my opinion, hand me their business cards, and so forth. It was really quite disconcerting.
I can understand why they thought it was necessary. In business, in politics, in almost every aspect of most peoples' lives, building relationships is inherent to accomplishing pretty much anything. But when it comes to deliverability, fawning over ISP staff will not get your mail where you want it to go. That's simply not how email operates.
In my experience, many marketers and other large-volume email senders confuse the tactics that will make the ISP staff like you with the tactics that will actually get your email to the inbox. ...
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
Sep
26
By George Bilbrey
VP & GM Delivery Assurance Solutions
As a former statistical analyst, I was pleased to see the recent Email Insider column by Loren McDonald on Six Sigma email deliverability. I think Loren makes an excellent point: marketers should pay attention to deliverability in precisely the same way that U.S. manufacturers paid attention to quality control.
You can read Loren's column for details, but the gist is that the keys to deliverability are:
Categories: Email Deliverability
Sep
24
By George Bilbrey
VP & GM Delivery Assurance Solutions
It has always been my belief that one of the contributions Return Path makes to the betterment of email is to facilitate the dialogue between senders and receivers. There's so much common ground there. Everyone wants to make consumers happy - happy consumers don't complain (can I hear a "yay" from receivers?) and happy consumers spend money (can I hear a "yay" from senders?). And we know that facilitating this dialogue is about more than just, well, dialogue. It means building systems and products that help senders and receivers find a common language and work together to make email the fun, safe, happy medium we all know if can be.
So with that backdrop I am very pleased to announce that J.D. Falk has joined the Return Path team. J.D., who joins us from the Yahoo! anti-spam product team, has been well known in the anti-spam space since the earliest days of email spam, and is very active in the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG), the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email (CAUCE), and other industry associations. J.D. has joined us to take over ...
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
Sep
19
By George Bilbrey
VP & GM Delivery Assurance Solutions
Some of our best clients are retailers. Why is that? Because they understand the value of their email program - it gets measured month-after-month (sometimes week-after-week) by the revenue it pulls in. And retailers know that email that goes missing from the inbox earns them no revenue.
This was the case for Orvis. They had a successful program that was generating revenue. But they suspected deliverability problems. They signed on with Return Path and learned the ugly truth - on average 20% wasn't reaching the inbox.
Some of our work to get Orvis back on track was "the basics." ...
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
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