Return Path’s Weekly Roundup

Read on for another 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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Reengage Your Inactive Subscribers by Improving Your Deliverability

According to a new study from the CMO Council, 48% of respondents view ‘acquisition of new accounts and opportunities’ as a top priority for marketers. While we agree that it’s important to invest in new business development, it’s worth considering what you might be able to do to re-engage with inactive subscribers. …

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Return Path Partners with Liveclicker

Today we are announcing a partnership with Liveclicker, a video commerce company. Online video in general and video in email specifically are hot topics in the online marketing community. Liveclicker offers what we think is a really great service – basically they take away all the complexity of dealing with video across many different email platforms. Their technology, which involves video .gifs, works seamlessly no matter where your email is viewed.

This partnership is part of our new umbrella of services, Certified Premium Services, which combines …

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Return Path Debuts In-Email Video Via Partnership With Liveclicker

i>The Latest Certified Premium Services Offering From Return Path Designed to Help Marketers and Publishers Increase Email ROI with Seamless, Embedded Videos

April 21, 2010 – Return Path, the global leader in email deliverability and reputation management services, in partnership with Liveclicker, the early leader in the emerging video commerce segment, today unveiled an in-video email solution to give marketers, and other companies sending email, a seamless and simple way to send in-email video. …

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Talking deliverability with our friends at Bronto

I had a great conversation the other day when our friend Chris Wheeler, Director of Deliverabilty at Bronto. We covered a range of topics but took deep dives on a couple of current and emerging issues like domain reputation, engagement metrics and the importance of certification and whitelisting. Read the interview in it’s entirety here.

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INDUSTRY ALERT: COX has a new Postmaster Page

Congratulations to our partners at COX for launching a new postmaster site.

Lots of ISPs have postmaster pages, so what’s the big deal about this one?

It’s frequently difficult to get all the information you might need to understand the rules of the road at an ISP. The Cox postmaster pages provide error code definitions, preferred connection configurations, instructions on how to sign up for Cox’s feedback loop (which is proudly powered by Return Path) and other useful information to help understand delivery issues. …

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Report from the UK: 4 Email Tips Guaranteed to Stuff Your Stocking

With another Royal Mail strike looming just as the busy shopping season gears up, it’s understandable for retailers in the United Kingdom to be in a bit of a panic. Having signed off months ago on glossy Christmas catalogues, marketing managers will be left wondering when customers will actually see the results of their hard work (and high printing costs). Will they remain in postal sorting limbo, will they ever be delivered and when? Online retailers will be worried as well: consumers are going to be less inclined to shop online if they can’t have a guaranteed shipping or delivery date for their items.

As if this year wasn’t hard enough on businesses trying to keep a positive balance sheet and stay upbeat amidst the dire financial and economic predictions, now this. So what’s a retailer to do? Where can a retail marketer turn during a quarter so crucial to the company’s bottom line? The answer is email. Now, more than ever. Here are three ideas for surviving, and thriving, the Christmas crunch …

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Retailers: Certification is a Holiday Response Booster

Retailers enjoy some of the lowest complaint rates in the business. Perhaps this is because of the “shopper mentality” among consumers. Many like to be treated like VIPS or insiders when it comes to sales and new product lines, and so even the high frequency (up to 10+ messages per week during the holidays) doesn’t seem to drive a lot of complaints for retailers with strong brand affinity.

Problem is, it doesn’t drive that much response, either. Sending more messages is not enough. The messages must offer more value.

I spoke at the Shop.org Annual Summit this week and met with dozens of retailers who are doing great things to strengthen their brand relationships through social and multi channel experiences. Email is such an integral part of the ecommerce equation, so it’s well past time to take it off auto pilot and start to improve relevancy through segmentation and added value.

I blogged about this at the Shop.org site. Let me know what your thoughts are – and if you’d like a copy of the full presentation.

In conversations with retailers about how to improve relevancy, one thing is very clear …

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One New Name, Two Levels of Trust

We have some exciting news to share today about certification services from Return Path.

We have incorporated two different programs – Sender Score Certified and SafeList (formerly from Habeas) – into one program called Return Path Certification. By combining these two programs, Return Path has developed the largest and most respected whitelist program in the email universe that is based on this key premise – if you can trust the sender, you can trust their mail.

For senders to participate in the program, they need only complete one application to be considered for Return Path Certification’s two levels of trust – Safe and Certified. To gain entry to our Safe level, senders must pass an audit of their email permission practices, privacy policy and legal compliance and show that they only send email from properly configured and authenticated servers. Then, companies whose reputation metrics identify them as “the best of the best” qualify for an automatic upgrade to the Certified level and gain access even more inboxes for no extra charge. Certified members also get special privileges like automatically enabled images and links at Windows Live Mail. …

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Fighting Spam in the New Economy

Happy New Year! Every January I take some time to reflect on recent industry trends and make some predictions and goals for the coming year. Needless to say, 2008 economic events have made a strong impact all around the globe. The anti-spam community, like many others, is bracing and already seeing the impact.

When times are tough, more people turn to crime. In the email business, this means spam and spam efforts will continue to increase. This includes pure evil spammers, who will redouble-efforts to get their annoying spam-messages in your inbox as well as semi-legitimate marketers, feeling the pinch of the economy, who will be tempted to be overly aggressive with their marketing campaigns and whose emails will cross the line from welcomed to unwelcomed and/or “spam”. The folks who are caught in the crosshairs of this issue are the ISPs and the email administrators – trying to sort through this increasing tide of junk mail while also being asked to make budget cuts.

That’s why I’m calling 2009 “The Year of Collaboration” among the ISP community. …

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