That’s The Way The Cookie Crumbles

On 26th May 2011, the law in the UK governing how cookies and similar technologies for storing information on user equipment may be used changed. In its guidance notes for implementation, The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO – an independent authority set up to uphold information rights in the public interest) advised that there would be a “lead in” period of 1 year, during which marketers would have an opportunity to move toward compliance. This period of grace is now close to ending, and enforcement of the revised legislation will commence in earnest at the end of May 2012. Marketers will be expected to be compliant or be on the way to compliance from this point.

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Why Are My Emails Going to the Spam Folder? How Subscriber Complaints Affect Inbox Placement.

Many people see email marketing as a one-way communication. Email marketers are sending emails to their recipients, who are then reading and/or deleting with no real dialogue back to the sender. However, it’s important to understand that it is a two-way street as subscribers do have various ways to communicate back to the sender via email activity (opens, clicks), spam complaints and trusted subscriber voting. And these communications from the recipients can negatively affect your inbox placement causing your emails to be delivered to the spam folder.

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Data Insights: Using Sender Reputation Data for Better Inbox Placement

Sender Reputation Data (SRD) is a metric that is used by Microsoft in its proprietary spam filtering software called SmartScreen that determines if a message should be delivered to the inbox, spam folder or blocked. It consists of a panel of hundreds of thousands of users and these panelists are asked to determine if the filtering decision that Microsoft’s spam filter made was correct or not. This provides more accurate feedback since it’s nearly impossible for spammers to game this metric. Additionally, SRD minimizes the effect that subscriber complaints can have on one’s reputation and deliverability if subscribers are erroneously using the junk button, either marking an email as junk on accident or using the junk button to delete or unsubscribe from an email. In that sense, sender reputation data is not a complaint metric, but rather a feedback metric. In fact, at Return Path, we find the metric so useful that we also use it as part of our compliance efforts for Return Path Certification.

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Using Sender Score to Avoid Being a Statistic

If you’ve read the Global Deliverability Benchmark Report, you now know that it’s more difficult than ever to reach the inbox with more commercial email landing in the spam folder than ever before. If you’re not worried about your mails landing in the spam folder, you should be. As DJ Waldow from Waldow Social recently asked, how often do people really check their spam folders for mail they were expecting? In most case, it’s not often at all. If you’re not making it to the inbox, you’re not getting a response, an impression, or even a conversion. Simply put: you’re wasting your time and money. You don’t have to be the 1 in 4 statistic that never reaches the inbox. I’ll explain how you can determine the reasons you’re not reaching the inbox, so you know what to focus your time and efforts on.

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Ready to Learn More about DMARC? Join Our Webinar with ExactTarget

If you have any interest in the latest news around email, email security, or phishing you’ve probably heard the buzz following up last week’s announcement of a new technology to help fight phishing and spoofing emails called DMARC (which stands for Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance). Along with all of the interest that we have seen both from the media and from the industry-at-large, I’ve still seen a fair amount of confusion around what DMARC currently is and is not. I wanted to take a couple of moments to help provide a bit more clarity on the topic as well as discuss some of the upcoming ways in which Return Path is helping to continually educate the email and security world on DMARC.

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Complaints: Why do they happen, and what can I do about them?

Complaints happen. It’s just one of those necessary evils of being an email marketer. However, they don’t have to be evil. In fact, I see them as a great way to learn from our subscribers and continually improve upon our …

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Remembering J.D.

This is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to write in 12 years as Return Path’s CEO. I hope it never has an equal.

One of our long-time employees, J.D. Falk, passed away today after a year-long struggle with cancer. J.D., which most people don’t know was short for Jesse David, was only 37 years old. Although I cannot claim to be a close friend of J.D.’s, I have known him fairly well in the industry going back about eight years, and he has been a trusted member of our team here for the last four+ years.

J.D. did great work for us at Return Path, but my admiration for him goes beyond that.

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A Marketer’s Field Guide to Cloudmark Email Filtering

Most marketers are not familiar with Cloudmark because they don’t host mailboxes nor do they operate under a recognized domain like hotmail.com or yahoo.com. However, they do provide anti-spam, phishing and virus protection to email providers covering over 1.6 billion mailboxes worldwide and are therefore a significant factor in getting your email delivered to your subscribers.

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Hotmail Launches Another Major Upgrade: What You Need to Know

Hotmail recently pushed another major update to help their users deal with the high amount of email they signed up for, called graymail, that will be slowly rolled out through the end of the year. While these tools will a major time saver for most Hotmail users, it could spell deliverability problems for your own email program. Here is a breakdown of the changes and what you should start thinking about now.

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A Marketer’s Field Guide to Comcast Inboxes

Comcast is the largest cable provider in the United States with 22 million subscribers comprising 32 million active mailboxes. Their email user base is made up of paid subscribers to their Internet service. Comcast provides a reliable email service with lots of storage. Unlike other North American cable providers, Comcast has invested significantly in their email service which includes a snappy Zimbra-based web interface.

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