Email Budget Redux

Email marketing can seem like one big chicken-and-egg syndrome. Which comes first – the money to execute a quality program, or the results needed to earn those internal dollars? Read my column in Email Insider today for some ideas on how to improve results cost effectively, giving you the ammunition you need to fight for the bigger email budget you need to drive significant change.

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So, where’d they go?

As we’ve reported a couple times in the past, one of our interesting nuggets at Return Path is a wealth of “ISP switching data” that comes from our very large, active, self-reported Email Change of Address, or ECOA, service (consumer sign-up; client info).

I noted the article floating around last week that AOL lost about 1 million subscribers last quarter, the lion’s share in the U.S., of course.

So, where’d they all go?

Well, according to our ECOA data, which may of course be somewhat skewed by our data sources (but has data from well over 1 million consumers each quarter), AOL users defected as follows:

To Yahoo! — 42.5%
To broadband providers in aggregate (cable, etc.)– 23.5%
To Hotmail/MSN — 19.5%
To Gmail — 2.7%

Thanks to my colleague Iffat Ahmed for help pulling these numbers together.

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A New Season for Bonded Sender (now Sender Score Certified)

Ah, spring. New life is everywhere. Winter clothes are being put away, birds are returning from their winters in the south, flowers are blooming. We at Return Path are doing our part by announcing the “rebirth” of our Bonded Sender Program, the Internet’s largest and oldest email accreditation program, or whitelist, as Sender Score Certified.

Since we acquired Bonded Sender last fall, we’ve had the opportunity to go on a “listening tour” – talking to marketers, publishers, ESPs, ISPs, spam filtering companies, system administrators, email appliance manufacturers – you name it. What we learned was that the program was ground-breaking when it was launched in 2002 but that it needed a makeover in order to meet the challenges that have evolved around spam and deliverability for both senders and receivers during the past few years.

Our listening tour revealed that the Bonded Sender of old had four core issues that weren’t sitting well with the Internet community at large:

1. Data validity: some senders questioned the accuracy of some of the application and compliance metrics used;

2. Black box: a complete lack of transparency led many senders to be unclear as to what was driving them to fail applications or have bonds debited;

3. Bond: there isn’t a purchasing department in America that knows how to post a bond or understands why they should; and

4. Complaints: as far as ISPs were concerned, even though mailers had to pass some serious hurdles to join the program, mailers who were in the program still managed to generate too many complaints among their end users.

A spring cleaning was in order, and we had the experts to get the job done ….

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At What Price False Positives?

As has been covered in many places, including Direct and The Wall Street Journal, Verizon settled a lawsuit yesterday over “too aggressive” spam filtering, or what we in the business call false positives — filtering out legitimate, non-spam emails as spam. This is a huge problem that part of our business at Return Path, our Delivery Assurance Solutions group, has been fighting for years.

The gist of the settlement is that Verizon is changing the way it filters spam to make sure more legitimate mail gets through, and that it is refunding various small amounts of money or free months of service to customers who complained about the problem.

I am NOT a believer in lawsuits like this at all ….

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Victory for Email: AOL Enhanced Whitelist to Stay

It’s official. AOL will keep its organic Enhanced Whitelist, clarifying that is not planning on replacing it with Goodmail’s email stamp program. Goodmail will now be ONE way, not the only way, to reach AOL inboxes. Charles Stiles, the postmaster for AOL, confirmed this earlier today on the phone with me, and I announced the news on CNBC’s Power Lunch.

This is a huge win for all companies who strive to do email the right way, earning the solid reputations that drive deliverability and response rates. Paying for inbox reach is akin to only having paid search engine marketing – it works for some business models, not others; some consumers like paid ads, some…

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Why Email Stamps Are a Bad Idea

The introduction of the email stamp model by Goodmail is a radical departure from the current email ecosystem. While I’m all for change and believe the spam problem is still real, I don’t think stamps are the answer. Rich Gingras of Goodmail, who I have a tremedous amount of respect for, has laid out some of his arguments for this plan here in the DMNews blog. I’ll respond to those arguments as well as add some others in this posting.

It seems that Rich’s main argument in favor of stamps is that whitelists don’t work. While he clearly does understand ISPs (he used to work at one), he doesn’t seem to understand the world of publishers and marketers. His solution is fundamentally hostile to the way they do business ….

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AOL and Goodmail: Two steps back for email, Part II

There’s been a lot of noise this week since the news broke about AOL and Goodmail, so I thought I’d take the opportunity to change the direction of the dialog a little bit.

First, there are two main issues here, and I think it’s healthy to separate them and address them separately. One issue is the merits of an email stamp system like the one Goodmail is proposing, relative to other methods of improving and ensuring email deliverability. The second issue — and the one that got me started earlier this week – is the question of AOL making usage of Goodmail stamps a mandatory event, replacing its enhanced whitelist. To really separate the issues, this posting will tackle the second question, and the next posting will tackle the first question.

I have reached out to Charles Stiles this morning to try to clarify AOL’s position …

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AOL and Goodmail: Two steps back for email

Remember the old email hoax about Hillary Clinton pushing for email taxation? When we first heard AOL’s plans for Goodmail today, we thought maybe the hoax had re-surfaced and a few industry reporters got hooked by it. But alas, this tax plan seems to be true.

AOL has long held the leading standard in email whitelisting. Every email sender who cares about delivery has tried to keep their email reputation high so that they could earn placement on AOL’s coveted Enhanced Whitelist. Now, AOL may be saying that those standards don’t matter…

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Spam is Dead. Long Live Spam!

As pointed out in The Register this week, it’s now been exactly two years since Bill Gates declared that Microsoft would eliminate spam in two years.

Hmmm.  Let’s think about that.  Filters do keep getting better, which Gates predicted.  But challenge/response filtering seems to be dead in the water, and the notion that we’re all going to pay for email stamps…

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The Rumors of Email's Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

It seems like there are signs of an email marketing renaissance left, right, and center these days. First, the industry has enjoyed significant growth this year. Every vendor I speak with in the space except for one or two is posting record numbers — whether they sell data, technology, or services. And many vendors have been swallowed up by larger multi-channel CRM or DM companies for nice prices.

Every marketer or publisher I speak with is investing more money into their email programs, and they are seeing stellar returns. In fact, their most persistent complaint is that…

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