Partner Case Study: Deliverability Win at Blue Sky Factory

Kudos to our friends over at Blue Sky Factory. They have been using our Sender Score suite of tools for their clients for some time now, and they are starting to see some real results. In fact, they just published a case study of their work with Caribbean Tours & Cruises.

Travel marketing can be tricky in the age of spam. Many of the words they would normally use in their content gets flagged by filters. The use of images – crucially important in making recipients long for that beach getaway – can get blocked and make emails unreadable. …

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JupiterResearch: Marketers Focus on the Wrong Stuff?

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.

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Sender Score Receiver Alliance Welcomes Four New Members

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.

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Don't Expect Your ESP to Have the Magic Wand for Solving Your Deliverability Issues

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…

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Case Study: How ESPs Can Really Help Clients Improve Deliverability

When deliverability issues first began to surface back in 2003, many marketers turned immediately to their email service provider and said, essentially, “Hey, what gives? Why aren’t you getting my email to the inbox?”

The irony is that the vast majority of the causes of deliverability problems have nothing to do with the service provider. As I wrote back in December, any reputable vendor has the basic sending infrastructure in place that will meet the requirements of ISPs and other receivers. I have stated many times in the past, in the majority of cases the fate of your email program was determined at the point of data collection. Why is that? Three reasons …

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How's Your Email Doing in Deutschland?

Take your mind back to 2002. You were perhaps just becoming aware that sometimes the email you sent didn’t make it where it was intended to go. Maybe you noticed your carefully crafted promotion went into the “junk” folder on your personal email account. Or you noticed a sudden dip in your metrics that wasn’t attributable to the usual factors. You maybe started hearing about blacklists and thought, “Hmmm, is my email being blocked by ISPs? Are my customers not seeing what I send?” And figuring it out was far from clear.

Then along came Return Path with the radical idea that there should be a way for marketers to know what was actually happening to the email they sent to customers and prospects. They created what would become Sender Score Mailbox Monitor and the rest, as they say, is history. …

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Sender Score Receiver Alliance Helps Global Deliverability

Global companies know that email deliverability is becoming just as big of a problem overseas as it is in the United States. Dealing with those problems becomes even more complex when you consider the number of time zones, language barriers, and the recent number of acquisitions in the European ISP market. Return Path has been helping clients internationally for a long time, and has now formalized its program to expand that help to its ESP partners.

With the Sender Score Receiver Alliance, ESPs benefit from …

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ESPs and Deliverability: What They Can Do, What They Can't Do

Earlier this quarter I wrote about the first step in finding an email service provider: getting your own program in order.

Meanwhile, another question that I get from a lot of email marketers is: which ESP is the best at deliverability?

Well, here’s the good news: when it comes to infrastructure and the basic technological and authentication set ups that ISPs are looking for, all the major vendors in the United States do just fine. Additionally many top-tier vendors have ISP relations or other deliverability professionals who can help fix minor problems as they arise. The smaller players tend to manage this through their technology departments and others offer that service through outsourcing (in some cases to Return Path). …

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The ESP Conundrum: First, Heal Thyself

On Tuesday I was invited to participate on a panel at the ClickZ Email Marketing Conference on the topic of outsourcing email sending vs. keeping that chore in-house. It was a very interesting conversation that surfaced some surprising discoveries.

The main takeaways were that many marketers …

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Bounceback Handling Debate

Last week, Dylan Boyd wrote an article about bouncebacks for Media Post’s Email Insider. The article had some good points about the impact of bounces on your email program, though it left me feeling the need to clarify a few differentiators between bounce rates and delivery rates, and the overall reasons bounces occur. I wrote a response that ran in today’s Online Media Daily. To learn more about bounce handling and delivery impacts, read on, and let me know if you have any questions.

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