The Online Trust Alliance Forum: The Training You Need to Bullet Proof Online Security and Trust Practices

Join us at the Online Trust Alliance’s 6th annual Online Trust Forum (with a special discount for Return Path readers)

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How Your Email Deliverability is Affecting Your Overall Revenue

In the perfect world, 100% of your emails would make it to your subscribers’ inboxes with no trouble at all. Your subscribers would receive your beautifully designed emails with all images and links enabled, and would spend all morning reading and clicking on your emails.

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How Email Marketers Can Start Preparing for Google+ Now

As an email marketer (or any marketer), you can’t seem to go anywhere without hearing about Google+. From how fast it has grown (25 million+) to what it is (a new way to share) and what it isn’t (a Facebook killer). Google+ is everywhere.

And yet, it can be difficult to determine if Google+ is the next big thing or just the newest social media kid on the block.

So, what does Google+ mean for email marketers? Should you care? While I can’t predict the future, here’s why email marketers should care and what they can start doing to prepare for Google+ or the next big thing.

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Webinar – Keep Pretenders Out! Strategies to Prevent Brand Messaging Abuse

Next week, Return Path’s Chief Security Officer Sam Masiello will be hosting a webinar for BrightTALK discussing how how to protect your company from criminals looking to exploit your brand for their own profit, using any means they can find.

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More Questions Around “Building Reputation and Spurring Engagement in the Age of Social and Mobile”

I recently presented a webinar for the AMA entitled “Building Reputation and Spurring Engagement in the Age of Social and Mobile.” You can listen to the recording. We had a great attendance, and didn’t have the opportunity to answer all of the audience questions. I promised the listeners I would follow-up in a blog post, so as promised; here are the answers to your questions.

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Email and Social Media: It’s more than Including an Icon

The marketing media is awash with talk of “integration” – in general, and specific to social media. But what does integration mean and what does it look like?

To answer that question, my colleague Stephanie Colleton and I couldn’t think of a better place than our very own inboxes. Over the course of a week, we looked at over 75 senders in our inboxes – publishers, retailers, B2B, hospitality, finance – and many more commercial email senders. While including social media calls to action may seem like a simple and logical first step toward integrating these two channels, our unofficial study reveals that marketers still have room for improvement.

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Webinar: Building Reputation and Spurring Email Engagement in the Age of Social and Mobile

Please join me on Thursday, June 9th, 2011 at 1:00PM EST for a discussion on how to use new inbox technologies, mobile and social to achieve higher engagement and deliverability rates.

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How Inactive Addresses Hurt Deliverability plus 3 Tips on What to Do

Inactive subscribers are a liability to anyone who sends email. They hurt deliverability, which in turn reduces your response rates, and before you know it, your email program isn’t making as money as it used to. Marketing managers usually understand that the key is to get rid of the deadweight to solve these problems, but most executives try to solve the revenue problem through a numbers game and sending to even more email addresses, many of which are inactive as well. So why should you care about removing inactive addresses?

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A follow-up on Marketing Sherpa’s webinar “Improve Email Deliverability: Tactics for Handling Complaints and Boosting Reputation”

Return Path and Marketing Sherpa joined forces to present a webinar on how to deal with complains. The turnout and questions were great. So great in fact, that we ran out of time to answer them all. Along with Marketing Sherpa co-presenter Adam Sutton, we decided to answer the questions in a two part blog series. Here’s the first.

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Warming Up IP Addresses: 5 Steps for Faster Inbox Placement

If you had talked to any email marketer 10 years ago and asked them how they dealt with blocks on their IP addresses, the answer would probably be the same: “We just switched IPs.” Not only was this an unfortunate, albeit effective, way to deal with blocks, it also became a common method used by spammers. They would simply send from one IP address for a very short time and then move on to another, either with IPs they owned or through hijacked computers controlled by botnets. Because of spammers’ behaviors, ISPs and email providers respond by temporarily blocking and limiting the amount of email a new IP address could send. ISPs now treat any new sending IP address like a dog on a short leash, and only extend the leash when the senders’ reputation is proven. To minimize the impact of having to move to a new IP address, consider the following:

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