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Email Deliverability Posts
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
Aug
13
By George Bilbrey
VP & GM Delivery Assurance Solutions
The August 6 issue of The New Yorker hit the newsstands with a piece about email spam: how it started, where it comes from today and what people from various businesses are doing to try and stop it. It was interesting to see this topic covered in such a lofty publication.
For the most part we thought the article was spot on. The writer discussed the matter at a fairly high level, but offered the lay reader a good sense of what the real issues are surrounding spam and filtering.
However, we thought the writer's discussion of reputation metrics as a way to combat spam was a little off-base ...
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
Jul
19
By George Bilbrey
VP & GM Delivery Assurance Solutions
Today, we announced a major upgrade of our Sender Score Monitor deliverability platform to include integrated real-time reputation analytics into our Mailbox Monitor campaign tracking module (see the official release here).
Well, we've reported - and others have echoed - that sender reputation is the main driver of blocking and filtering by ISPs and commercial spam filters. On average, 83% of false positive filtering of legitimate, permissioned, marketer and publisher email is driven by the reputation of your sending IP address or domains - things like complaints, security holes in your email servers, and spam trap hits.
So now our service helps guide clients to immediately diagnose all of the major root causes of deliverability failures.
Why is this a big deal? ...
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
Jul
09
By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman
Back in 2005, when commercial emailers started adopting authentication en masse, the Direct Marketing Association stuck its neck out a bit and took a leadership position by requiring that all of its member companies authenticate their email.
Of course, this was much easier said than done. First, marketers found authentication confusing and weren't sure exactly what standards to implement or how to do it from a technical standpoint, or how to ensure comprehensive enterprise-wide authentication across all outbound email servers, including those of vendors and partners. And then, for the DMA, tracking compliance was nearly impossible in a comprehensive way, although secret shopping and spot checking have been producing positive results since authentication became de rigeur (apparently, I am feeling very French today).
In my role as chairman of the DMA's Interactive Marketing Advisory Board I saw a great opportunity to use Return Path's Sender Score technology to help solve both of these problems. The result is the soon-to-be-launched Email Reputation Registry (see official announcement here). ...
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
Jul
01
By Dan Deneweth
Director, Product Management
Rendering has been a hot topic in email marketing for most of 2007, but many clients still aren't sure exactly what it means or exactly how to deal with it. This is why we ran a webinar last week on this very topic.
In the webinar we revealed the six steps to most effectively deal with image suppression...
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
Jun
26
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? ...
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
Jun
21
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 ...
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
Jun
20
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. ...
Tell me moreCategories: Email Deliverability
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