Summer Lovin': Acquire New Customers Now

Summer is almost here. Time to roll out some summer campaign ideas.
Executing a lead generation campaign capturing email addresses while most folks are out enjoying sun and sand can be a challenge. But it’s a lot easier if you use the season to your advantage. What types of content could you offer to make people give you a few minutes of time and fill out a form?

Print and color pages: It might seem quaint with some many minivans sporting the multiple DVD players, but some good off-screen fun can also help keep kids occupied during long car trips this summer. Offer harried parents a quick and easy download experience and promise more pages for back to school, Halloween and the holidays. …

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What Do Women Want? Email and Chocolate

According to a recent study by BlogHer and Compass Partners, 36.2 million women are participating in a blog every week: 15.1 million are publishing and 21.2 million are reading and commenting. Perhaps even more interesting, the women that took part in the study said they would give up alcohol (55%), their PDAs (50%) and reading newspapers or magazines (43%) in order to keep writing and reading blogs. Their dedication had limits, however: 80% of the women surveyed refused to give up chocolate.

So, other than the fact that the confections industry can breathe a sigh of relief, what does this mean for email? Marketers, take note: Women online have purchasing power. The study found that the women who are engaged with blogging are educated (57% graduated from college) and well paid (46% earn $75K or more). These women could very well be your most active, responsive and engaged subscriber segments. How can you serve them better? Consider these three ideas …

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Drawing the Line: Where We Come out

In the first post in this series, I laid out a dilemma we’ve had internally at Return Path in recent months: whether and how we accept clients who are in “grey” businesses like alcohol, pornography, and neutriceuticals, and whether that applies uniformly across all of our products (software vs. consulting vs. whitelist). In the second post, I reposted a summary of all the comments we received from readers. Now comes the fun part — the so what.

We had a good series of conversations internally on this issue that included some very spirited debate. Here’s where we come out.

First, we drew a distinction between three types of potentially “troublesome” clients: those whose businesses are illegal, or who advertise or sell illegal products; those whose businesses are involved in litigation around email, data, privacy, or security; and those whose businesses are in the grey area, or what we called in our discussions “morally hazardous.” In the end, we decided …

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Marketing to Mom

With Mother’s Day coming this weekend, I’ve been thinking a lot about “Mommy marketing.” Pregnancy, childbirth and new parenthood offer a predictable set of challenges that makes this audience a natural for lifecycle marketing. And, are you surprised to hear us say this, a natural for email.

A colleague of mine recently had a baby and she was struck by how many companies spent a lot of money purchasing her name and then sending her direct mail – including samples! – but didn’t build in an email component.

Let’s take a look at a few of the big companies, what they did and what they could have done better

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Drawing the Line: Your Thoughts

A few years back when we launched our blog, we disabled the comments feature because we got far too much spam and far too little actual conversation. Boy am I sorry for that! My post last week, Drawing the Line, drew a number of insightful comments by email. With the permission of those readers I’m going to share some of those comments here. (Meanwhile, a mirror post on my personal blog, OnlyOnce, drew a few public comments with similar themes.) Look for a third post in a few days which outlines where we come out on the debate.

The overwhelming consensus was that we should not treat legal businesses in “sin” industries any different than any other business. This position was articulated best by Dean F. Sutherland who wrote: “Stick to email practices and legality. Leave questions of morality to the private decisions of private folks. After all, one man’s morality is another man’s bad joke… and vice versa.”

In fact, writer Thomas Kellar cited automobiles, insurance and pharmaceuticals, among others, as industries that might also be considered sinful. He, along with a few other writers, objected to the inclusion of guns on our list, which are protected by the Second Amendment.

Ed Levinson posed the question …

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Go West! Return Path Experts Head to Dallas

Last week I wrote about Return Path’s Email Expert Seminar heading to Denver, Colorado. Well, in that same week we are also making a stop in Dallas, Texas.

The agenda for both seminars has been created to be super-informative and ultra-interactive. First, you will hear from our own email experts – Stephanie Miller, George Bilbrey and Bonnie Malone Fry – as they give you the lowdown on email reputation, subscriber experience and acquisition strategies. We then move into roundtables where you’ll get to ask our experts the questions that keep you up at night. Our experts, along with your colleagues at the table, will help you think through new tactics to achieve your email marketing goals.

We’ve also lined up two great speakers in Dallas. …

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The Comcast Feedback Loop is Available Exclusively from Return Path

We are very pleased to announce that Comcast now offers a complaint feedback loop, powered by Return Path. (For you deliverability nerds, you might note that we got beaten on this announcement by our friends at Deliverability.com. We appreciate the plug!)

Those of us who work in the industry feel like everyone should, by now, grok what a feedback loop is and why it’s so useful for both senders and end recipients of email. But we know that’s not completely true yet, so this seems like a good time to review the history and initial purpose of feedback loops.

When a user clicks the “report spam” button (or equivalent) in their mail client, a copy of that message (a spam “complaint”) is transmitted to their ISP. This type of system is generally only used by web-based mail clients such as Yahoo! Mail or Hotmail, or in custom desktop interfaces such as AOL’s, though some anti-spam vendors offer plug-ins for Outlook or Thunderbird. The ISP can use these reports, in aggregate, to update and improve their spam filters. …

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Email Marketing Secrets

The secret to high return email marketing is that there is no secret. There is only one way to drive higher revenue and deliverability is to create compelling subscriber experiences.

And it’s important to remember that email subscriber experiences don’t happen in a vacuum. Our subscribers are also our prospects and customers and interact with us in many channels outside of email.

I spoke this week about great email marketing in a presentation titled, “Seven Email Marketing Secrets” at the newly revamped and rather fabulous Interactive Marketing Expo (produced by the Chicago Association of Direct Marketing). One thing that really stands out when you meet with direct marketers is that email and mobile marketing are embraced as important and fascinating channels, but are not the drivers of the direct marketing mix. I spend so much time talking about email marketing with email marketers, that it’s refreshing to get out of the echo chamber and talk about email with folks who do direct or interactive marketing and dig in to why email can be such an important part of a multichannel approach.

This is, of course, the strategy that every successful email marketer takes. …

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Drawing the Line

We are having a bit of a debate at the moment internally around our Sender Score deliverability business about how to handle clients who are in businesses that are, shall we say, not exactly as pure as the driven snow.  As a company that provides software and services to businesses without a vertical focus, we are often approached by all sorts of companies wanting our services where we don’t love what they do.  Examples include:

• Gambling
• Tobacco
• Neutriceuticals
• Guns
• Adult content or products

Our challenges are along three dimensions, each of which is a little different.  But common threads run through all three dimensions. 

…

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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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