It's Client Appreciation Week at Return Path!

We have something big to say…

THANK YOU CLIENTS!

This week is about you! All this week everyone at Return Path is making an extra effort to recognize our clients, who are valued members of the email community.

Thank you for your positive contributions to the email universe. Thank you for your efforts to provide effective, relevant email to your customers. Thank you most of all for your partnership and willingness to allow us to show you the “path” to inbox nirvana.

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A View of The Email Universe: Return Path's Q2 Reputation Benchmark Report

When we set out to build a reputation data network we had a strong sense that the volume of email being sent to top receivers was staggering. But sensing is one thing. Having empirical data is another.

Which is why I’m so excited about the Return Path Q2 Reputation Benchmark Report. Now we have actual email performance data that tells us what the email traffic really looks like.

You can read the report yourself here.

Here’s my high level take on what we found:

1. Most of the servers sending email shouldn’t be. Only 20% of the IPs we studied were …

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Eighty Percent of Email is Being Sent From Illegitimate or Unknown Mail Servers According To Return Path’s Reputation Benchmark Report

Commercial Mailers With Low Unknown User Rates and No Spam Trap Hits Have Delivery Rate Increases of More Than 20 Points

NEW YORK & DENVER–Eighty percent of email is being sent from illegitimate or unknown mail servers, Return Path discovered with its new Return Path Reputation Benchmark Report. Return Path found that forty-six percent of email is being sent from hosts that should not be sending email at all – compromised hosts, dynamic IP addresses, and other non-mail servers. In addition, 34% of email is sent from “unknown” IPs which are not classifiable by available data.

Return Path conducted the Reputation Benchmark study by examining a sample of 2.3 million IPs pulled from the Return Path Reputation Data Network – a cooperative data network that collects and analyzes email data from more than 20 ISPs and other data providers representing more than 100 million mailboxes.

For the study, Return Path removed the data from servers that do not have reverse DNS and are clearly not supposed to be sending email. If you factor in the 35% of servers with no reverse DNS, the “bad” mail hosts goes even higher …

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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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Rocky Mountain High

Last month we took our best email experts and hit the road to bring fresh, new marketing ideas to San Francisco and Los Angeles. This month we embark on the next leg of the tour.

Next stop is the Mile High City on May 27. Not only will you learn best practices from our expert team of Return Pathers, but you will get first hand knowledge and advice from other email marketers just like you. On tap for Denver, are email marketers from Memolink, Shop at Home, Sierra Trading Post and LifePics who will share their experiences on how they cope with everyday email challenges to drive revenue for their businesses. Best of all, it’s a great opportunity for you to get your specific questions answered one-on-one during our email expert roundtables.

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Let the Phone Gather Dust; Brush off the Spreadsheet Instead

“What’s all the fuss about?” A marketer asked me the other day during an industry event. When you generally follow best practices for deliverability, she said, you usually can get into the inbox. Then, if a big block does occur, you just call Return Path to get it lifted. “There is enough wiggle room, right?”

Um, no. Not really.

Our smart client Nathan Murphy at Classmates.com got it right when he said the other day, “If I do my job well, I should never be in the position of having to contact an ISP because of a delivery problem. I feel that some people in the industry view email delivery as a reactive role and not preventative.”

Can Return Path get blocks lifted for our clients because we know their practices and program integrity and feel comfortable representing them?

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Trust in Email Begins with Authentication

Unfortunately, forging From: or other commonly seen email headers is trivially easy. It’s one of the most frustrating oversights in the creation of internet email technology — though of course that’s only obvious in hindsight; it was just fine for the pre-internet networks of the late 1970s and early-mid 1980s.

Since then, things have changed — and the most interesting recent technological advancements in email have been in the realm of sender authentication, which encompasses ways to verify that the apparent sender of a message actually is the entity which sent it. Before you can answer the question “can I trust this message?,” you first have to ask “who sent it?” — but before authentication, there was often no way to know for sure.

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Counting the Loose Change

Our good client Andrew Magpantay, Senior Product Manager at Reunion.com, coined a great expression when he spoke at our client seminar in Los Angeles on Thursday. He said that reconnecting with non-responders on the file is like gathering up the “loose change.” Sure, there is some value there, and if you have a lot of it lying around it adds up to real dollars, but the risk is that complaints rates are higher from these subscribers and there is a risk of spam traps from old addresses. To extend his analogy, the trick is to figure out if it’s worth the work to overturn the couch for a few dollars.

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Get Fresh, New Email Ideas: Expert Seminars

So you are sitting at your desk, staring at your email promotion calendar thinking “Is there a single new idea left in the world? What do my subscribers really want? What are the newest rules for getting to the inbox? What are other marketers doing to get out of the rut?”

If this describes you, then you need to come to Return Path’s Email Expert Seminars . The smartest minds in email today will be on hand to give you a fresh perspective on email. You’ll view the world from the perspectives of subscribers, ISPs and your fellow marketers. You’ll also get a fresh perspective on email acquisition and learn some bold new ways to apply those same old best practices.

Our experts are coming to …

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JupiterResearch: Marketers Focus on the Wrong Stuff?

As many readers of this blog will no doubt already know, the JupiterResearch report on ESPs that was released this month found that 70% of marketers rank “deliverability” as their number one priority when selecting an email service provider. While we applaud marketer’s attention to deliverability issues, it seems to us that their focus has been placed slightly in the wrong direction. As I’ve written before, ESPs cannot solve all deliverability problems for email marketers. Moreover, there is very little difference between the major players on the pieces that the ESP can control. Basically, you can stop worrying about whether or not your ESP can get the email through. They do a good job.

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