Back to Basics: What is the connection between reputation and deliverability?

As we discussed in part 1 and 2 of this series, nothing in email is easy. While many factors contribute to a challenging environment, I think we can all agree that spam is at the center of everything that makes email difficult. If it wasn’t for spammers and their irresponsible practices, email would work better for everyone. Unfortunately there is no “silver bullet” solution to keep spam out and wanted email in. Over time, through a lot of hard work and collaboration, sender reputation has emerged as way to distinguish legitimate businesses from spammers. Today, there are clear metrics that contribute to a good reputation and specific practices that result in a bad reputation. Return Path has even developed a simple way to measure reputation in the form of our Sender Score. Still there is a lot of confusion about reputation and what role it plays in ensuring email deliverability. Muddling the issue even more are the many vendors who oversimplify the issues and challenges – and fail to emphasize the essential relationship between a good reputation and strong inbox delivery rates.

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Complacent Marketers Give Hope to Social Media

A Houses of Parliament debate I attended recently gave a cold reception to the notion that social media will ultimately be the death of traditional forms of marketing. However, email marketers’ continued failure to provide interesting, relevant content in their marketing messages is playing into social media’s hands.

Speakers at the debate, including representatives from Facebook UK and More Than, debated the pros and cons of social media and its relationship with more traditional marketing formats, such as direct mail, television and radio. The end result of the debate, organised by the DMA (UK), was a unanimous public decision that the notion of social media killing off traditional media was farcical.

But there’s no denying social media is a massively growing medium…

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Return Path joins Signal Spam

Return Path has been working relentlessly to improve email for both Marketers and ISPs since 1999 by championing inbox standards and helping to make email work better by scoring and certifying email senders from around the world.

Today we are the world’s leading inbox deliverability solution and our clients include Fortune 500 firms, online retailers, publishers, market researchers and catalogers across many different industries. Our data is used by most of the largest email providers worldwide.

Despite these accomplishments, one of our core beliefs remains to be that no one company can solve all the problems currently facing email today, but a collaborative method involving as many participants from the entire email eco system will get us closer to it, faster. This is why Return Path is heavily involved with international industry organizations such as MAAWG, OTA, and EITS in their quest to implement best practices, every step of the way.

Return Path has also worked closely with the French non-profit association, Signal Spam for several years now and recently made the decision to join their first line of defense for French Inboxes…

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Return Path’s Weekly Roundup

This is the first installment of our new In The Know feature: Return Path’s Weekly Roundup! We will be compiling some buzz-worthy articles surrounding the email industry. Stay tuned on Fridays to get your much-needed weekly dose of the industry.

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Next Week’s Webinars for the Savvy Email Marketer

Times are changing for marketers everywhere and the fate of the email channel is often questioned. The good news is that email isn’t going anywhere. However, the new kids on the block – mobile and social media – are changing the game. It’s time for email marketers to re-evaluate their strategies to be successful in 2011 and beyond

So next week, Return Path is sponsoring two webinars in conjunction with Marketing Sherpa and eMarketer respectively, that address the top challenges faced by email marketers amidst these trendy channels.

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Back to Basics: What’s the deal with the “delivered rate”?

So you would think measuring how much email makes it to the inbox and how much doesn’t would be straightforward. Unfortunately, like most things in email, it’s complicated. As usual the complexity is largely a function of misleading terminology and the lack of transparency in the email eco-system. In an ideal world the “delivered rate” metric would mean exactly what it seems to say: the percentage of email that arrived in the inbox. In fact, most of the time “delivered rate” is the percentage of email that was sent but didn’t bounce. If the email didn’t bounce, it should have been delivered, right? Wrong.

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Why I Love My Board

Today, Return Path is happy to announce that we are adding a new independent director, Scott Petry, the founder of Postini and now a senior email product leader at Google. Scott’s a fantastic addition to our already strong Board, and the process of recruiting and adding him has made me reflect a bit on my Board and its strengths and weaknesses, so I thought I’d share a couple of those thoughts here.

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Scott Petry, Founder of Postini, Joins Return Path’s Board of Directors

November 10th, 2010 – New York City – Return Path, the global leader in email deliverability and security services, today announced that Scott Petry of Google (GOOG) has joined its Board of Directors. Mr. Petry founded Postini in 1999 and continued to lead the company through its acquisition by Google in 2007 for $625 million. Mr. Petry joined Google as product management director.

Today Google Postini Services is the leading enterprise-level anti-spam solution serving tens of thousands of businesses across all industries. Early clients included Merrill Lynch, Circuit City, and Hormel Foods — the company that makes the canned meat product known as Spam.

Mr. Petry began his career at Apple Computer (AAPL) in the product management group where he worked on the Newton PDA product. He was also a US national team rower and won a bronze medal in the 1987 world championships.

Mr. Petry joins a Board that includes many business and technology luminaries including Fred Wilson, Greg Sands, and Scott Weiss.

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Back to Basics: Why Everybody’s NOT An Expert

There is no doubt about it email is a complex channel. Consumers love it but they hate it. Spammers abuse it. ISPs struggle to tame it. Most confusing of all, everybody is an expert and everybody has an opinion. This is especially true in the area of deliverability where every vendor in the industry claims to know how to get your email delivered. This claim usually has little to do with the vendor’s core business. So what does it take to be a deliverability expert? How do you know if you have a deliverability problem? Where do you go to find out what percentage of your email actually gets delivered to the inbox? Not the junk or bulk folder but the inbox, where a relevant and expected message can earn an open, click or conversion.

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How to Survive the Email Zombie Apocalypse

In George Romero’s original Living Dead trilogy, flesh hungry zombies destroyed civilization and were a metaphor for mindless consumerism. They could only be stopped by shooting them in the brain, burning it to nothing, or chopping it into smaller pieces. Inactive subscribers, let’s call them zombie addresses, on your email marketing file are very similar, but a lot less gory to remove. Back in September, I spoke at the OMMA show in NYC about how the ISPs are now using engagement metrics to filter and block email at a subscriber and global level (you can see the presentation here), and one thing they are paying attention to is how many inactive addresses you’re mailing. They do this to gauge the quality of your lists and hygiene practices, as well as to accurately calculate complaint rates. If that isn’t scary enough, inactive addresses also have a high risk of turning into spam traps which can negatively affect your deliverability. You should really focus on removing these zombie addresses that are alive on your file but not responding and eating away at the ROI of your email program. Here’s your 3-step action plan to survive the upcoming email zombie deliverability apocalypse…

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