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.

Tell me more

Categories: Best Practices Commentary Explanation Return Path View Comments

A Marketer’s Field Guide to AOL Inboxes

You’ve got mail! After more than a decade, AOL is still a major webmail player in the United States. Most reports rank AOL #4 in total mailboxes behind Microsoft Hotmail Live, Yahoo! and Gmail respectively. The company has a global reach but its presence is about half of the other major players if you count their number of worldwide mailboxes.

Tell me more

Categories: Best Practices Commentary Explanation View Comments

Word of the Week: Opt-in

This week’s Word of the Week is opt-in, where I highlight some blogs and articles dealing with opt-in and how marketers depend on proper and effective opt-in methods for higher list growth and deliverability.

Tell me more

Categories: Best Practices Commentary News Return Path View Comments

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.

Tell me more

Categories: Best Practices How-To Return Path View Comments

How to Be a Great at Ping Pong and Email Marketing

I love ping pong, and that’s probably a bit of an understatement. I may have gotten a blister from playing so much during my last visit, but I will neither confirm nor deny that. Luckily, I’m not the only one who appreciates a good game of ping pong. I’ve had a lot of fun spending time with some terrific Return Path players. As it turns out, ping pong is actually good for you, according to this article sent around by our own Senior Director of People, Cathy Hawley, who beat me the last time I visited. I’m currently in training for the rematch.

So what does ping-pong have to do with email marketing? It turns out that the best practices that apply to optimizing your email marketing campaigns and the skills required to win a game of ping pong are actually very similar. Let me elaborate…

Tell me more

Categories: Commentary View Comments

Give Your Emails Some Comic Relief

In the spirit of Red Nose Day—I’ve been thinking about what makes email funny. Other than two great cartoons, which I have tacked to my office wall, I couldn’t really come up with much. Instead, I’d like to use this post to expound on a few ways to make email fun. Yes, that’s right— fun.

Tell me more

Categories: Best Practices View Comments

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…

Tell me more

Categories: Commentary View Comments

Targeted Email Sightings: Alive and Well in Cyberspace

It’s a bit tricky to optimize email in this current environment. On one hand, with all of our marketing budgets under incredible scrutiny, email has taken center stage as an economical and high ROI channel. All that attention means temptation to just send more and more – but of course that has penalties in spiked complaint rates, lower deliverability and exasperated subscribers.

On the other hand, consumers and business professionals are holding tight to their dollars and cents – and retailers, travel companies and even B2B marketers are responding with all kinds of great deals and discounts. “Can we just please send an email for every new deal?” you may be hearing from your brand and product managers. Yikes – that just increases the frequency and lowers the relevance for everyone.

Combined, the effect is that the inbox is even more crowded with great deals. I sorted my personal account by subject line this morning and the first 300 messages started with “50% off.” Wow. We aren’t in Kansas anymore, Toto.

All the more reason to offer three cheers for Sears Holdings, J.C Penney, Target and Gap (and Sears agency Ogilvy) for sharing their email targeting success stories with the Wall Street Journal (subscription required).

The Journal reports that …

Tell me more

Categories: Commentary View Comments

Our Daily Email Challenges

It’s gorgeous weather (well, except for that nasty, cold snow squall that hit us yesterday afternoon) here in Park City, Utah and the Email Insider Summit is in full swing. Energy is high, especially after the first day of fabulous content that got us all talking and challenging each other. As a programming committee member, I can give huge insider props along with my heartfelt thanks to David Baker of Avenue A Razorfish who put this program together.

Here’s some of what we are all talking about…. and you can read my and others’ blog posts from the event at Mediapost Live. If you are on Twitter, there are a number of us tweeting throughout the event – just search for #eis (my Twitter profile is SAMRPath).

Stephen Geer of Obama for America reminded us all that we have to balance risk and reward when we make deliverability (and revenue opportunity) decisions every day. No question the Obama team reinvented campaigning in the US. Email was a critical component of both communicating the message as well as driving action. For Geer, frequency and complaints went hand in hand. Frequency seemed to win. His answer, “We knew that we could survive a certain amount of churn (fatigue combined with deliverability failures) because of our list growth.”

Same for all of us. How much frequency is too much? …

Tell me more

Categories: Commentary View Comments

Cool Email Idea: Special Election Day Edition

What: Super-Customized Content

Who: McCain/Palin

Why we love it: Since we previously praised the Obama campaign’s list-building efforts, it’s only fair to give a little “Cool Thing” shout-out to the GOP. Check out this super-relevant, highly-targeted email aimed at getting voters in swing-state Colorado headed to the polls early. The email includes the address of our polling location, driving directions, poll hours and more.

What would make it better: Branding is important …

Tell me more

Categories: Commentary View Comments