May
11
By Margaret Farmakis
By Margaret Farmakis
Senior Director, Response Consulting
I'm pleased to announce today the release of our newest research study: Creating Subscriber Experiences That Maximise Returns for UK Marketers.
We've spent a good amount of time in the past year studying the subscriber experiences created by top brands in the U.S. First was our Creating Great Subscriber Experiences: Are Marketers Relationship Worthy?, which looked at sign up, welcome messages, targeting techniques and more. We followed that up with a look at the experience created by the same companies when subscribers chose to opt out of receiving email in Keeping the Subscriber Experience Positive After "Unsubscribe Me." And finally, our study on Increasing Revenues by Optimizing Emailing Practices with Online Buyers looked at how some of the top retailers in the U.S. handle email for buyers versus non-buyers and some of the tactics they use in their transactional messaging.
So this year we decided to turn some of our attention to the experience for email subscribers outside the U.S. We've said before that marketing in Europe is neither ahead nor behind the U.S. - it's just different. This new study certainly proves that point. U.K. marketers aren't doing demonstrably better or worse than their American counterparts. But they are definitely missing opportunities to improve their results with email marketing.
A few key findings ...
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May
07
By Stephanie Miller
VP, Global Market Development
The new chairman of the US Federal Trade Commission took office with the Obama administration in January. However, Chairman Jon Leibowitz and many of his key deputies have been with the agency for years, so much of the work continues seamlessly. In a DMA/Email Experience Council webinar last week, Peder Magee, Esq., FTC Privacy and Theft attorney in the Bureau of Consumer Protection said, "The FTC is bipartisan and works on consensus. Typically things are done with unanimous vote. We've had a fair amount of consistency from where we've been."
For now, that stance seems to suggest that the self regulation of the industry is working. Magee noted that some concepts "transcend the medium" when it comes to self regulation. "Transparency, prominent notice, use of personal data, and providing the ability to opt out easily" all are areas the FTC continues to watch.
Certification and feedback loop programs were noted by panelist Tom Bartel, CPO of Return Path, as an example of how the industry cooperates in order to make self regulation work. Especially for certification programs, "Email marketers put themselves forward voluntarily to be held to high standards," Bartel says. "Including the things Peder listed about prominence. Once they are vouched for by the third party, the ISPs can make good decisions about what to do with email from those senders.
"Participation in these programs shows marketers are willing ...
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Apr
29
By Stephanie Miller
VP, Global Market Development
As magazine and publisher subscribers move online, you would think that they become more valuable. Content is no longer a static experience, it's social. Subscribers comment, provide reviews, share with their networks and forward to colleagues. They sign up for email newsletters that arrive frequently, and customize their experience to just the sections and features they enjoy most.
Even though the cost to deliver content is streamlined, the cost to produce it is higher - subscribers demand more timely and comprehensive coverage than ever before. That gives advertisers, editors and publishers lots of opportunities to connect, and lots of data to work with. So you'd think that the CPMs to advertisers would be at least consistent with the old print days, when you put in your creative and hoped that someone paused long enough to read it, let along reply or take action.
Strangely, however, just based on the disparity of CPMs between print and online, subscribers seem to become less valuable to advertisers when they go digital.
Perhaps back in the day when online was a compliment ...
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Apr
09
By Tom Bartel
By Tom Bartel
Chief Privacy Officer
While it seems that every new administration wants to put their stamp on things, it's still not entirely clear what the Obama team, including new Federal Trade Commission Chief Jon Leibowitz, wishes to do in the realm of email and digital marketing. The administration has already called for increased efforts on effective self-regulation. If industry can't meet the call, what new regulations might be expected from Congress in the coming years? To find out, I will be helping guide a frank conversation with the FTC staff along with DMA government affairs vice president Jerry Cerasale in a webinar on April 29.
We will cover ...
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Apr
08
By Stephanie Miller
VP, Global Market Development
Ah "social media." The crack-cocaine of digital marketing. Mention those words and your session at a conference is overflowing. Put them in your headline and your blog post readership spikes.
Beyond the hype, however, there are lots of smart marketers testing the waters and even already reaping the benefits of intelligent social marketing. A great way to keep up with the best stuff out there is the daily e-newsletter SmartBrief on Social Media, aiming to enlighten us all on ways to use social marketing to our advantage. SmartBrief on Social Media is just one of the offerings from our friends at SmartBrief, who provide news summaries of the top happenings in various industries.
I'm delighted to be a part of the SmartBrief on Social Media Advisory Board a venerable "who's who" of digital marketing leaders who are helping to guide the editorial mission.
To give you an idea of the breadth and power of the social media coverage, here's a sampling of stories included in SmartBrief on Social Media in the past week ...
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Apr
01
By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman
February marked the official end of Return Path being in the email sending business, even a little bit. Of course we still have corporate email servers, and we still have basic retention email marketing programs for our customers and prospects (with explicit permission of course!), but after a 9 1/2 year run, we no longer have direct consumer email-based relationships.
As we announced last fall, we recently divested all of our businesses other than our deliverability and whitelisting business -- Postmaster Direct (list rental), Authentic Response/MyView.com (surveys), and ECOA (change of address). Those were great businesses, but they increasingly diverged over the years from each other and from our core deliverability business, so it made sense for them to belong to different companies in the end.
Besides diverging from each other, being a bulk sender of email had both advantages and disadvantages for us as a company. On the one hand ...
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Mar
25
By Stephanie Miller
VP, Global Market Development
Return Path did its first ever Twitterview (an interview over Twitter) with Simon O'Day, co-founder of eServices, one of our partner email service providers in Australia. Simon was one of the panelists in my session on "Taking Email Global" at the Email Evolution Conference in February. He has so many interesting things to say, that we wanted to explore deeper. We took that exploration to the Twit-o-sphere.
We had a wide-ranging conversation, however, my three top takeaways are:
1. Don't assume you know the local market even if you know the language.
2. Partner with an ESP that can manage data, character sets and templates.
3. Consider the larger picture, meaning other media, the use of the inbox and mobile devices.
Below are the highlights of our conversation. Share what you think by placing your thoughts in the comments section below. Please do suggest yourself or other people for future Tuesday Twitterviews!
Thanks again to Simon for so generously sharing his insights and ideas.
Enjoy!
@StephanieSAM: Hello @simonoz! Thanks for joining the Twitterview. ...
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Mar
19
By Anita Absey
SVP Sales, Service and Marketing
We're big fans of promoting email marketing best practices. We specialize in helping our clients understand what they need to do to manage their reputations, and improve their inbox deliverability. Deliverability directly affects your ROI, and the success of your email programs. Now more than ever, email marketers need to do everything they can improve clicks and conversions.
We try to practice what we preach, and that brings us to a best practice that we are implementing today. We are very excited to announce the launch of the Return Path Preference Center. We realize the imperative of sending email that your subscribers actually want, and we've always tried to send you relevant messages. And of course we always promptly honored opt-outs. But, now we're making it easy for you to get the messages you want and to opt out of those you don't, in one centralized place. The choice is yours. And you can change your mind whenever you want.
Check out our Preference Center now, and get ready to receive relevant, timely email that you WANT. ...
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Mar
11
STUDY CONDUCTED BY RETURN PATH'S NEW PROFESSIONAL SERVICES GROUP
For Immediate Release -- Online retailers have spent years optimizing their digital marketing and customer retention strategy. However, many online retailers still struggle to maximize the numerous sales opportunities available through more effective email marketing, a new study from Return Path reveals. The Increasing Revenues By Optimizing Emailing Practices with Online Buyers report conducted by Return Path's newly revamped Professional Services Group discovered that while basic transactional email practices are excellent, many well-known brands missed opportunities to maximize sales and up-sell potential by better targeting messages to buyers and including promotions in transactional messaging.
Return Path's Professional Services Group conducted the Increasing Revenues By Optimizing Emailing Practices with Online Buyers report by purchasing items from 45 online retailers, monitoring the transactional and promotional message streams, and comparing those emails messages with messages received by registering for the same email programs without making a purchase.
The new study discovered that ...
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Mar
10
By George Bilbrey
President
Back in December I wrote about Return Path's move to new office space in Broomfield, Colorado. A friend of Return Path posted a comment asking to see pictures. It took a little while, but we finally got some taken ...
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