World-Class Education

By Stephanie Miller
VP of Strategic Services

Increasingly, marketers find themselves incorporating a wide array of marketing techniques into a cohesive, successful plan. Whether it is figuring out how to leverage email and search investments or doing a multi-channel outreach across online and offline advertising platforms, we are all in need of new ideas and methods. That is one of the reasons that Return Path is supporting the regional Online Marketing Summit series...

Categories: News

A Brand New View

By: Anita Absey
VP Sales & Marketing

I woke up today with a new way to look at the email industry, Return Path, and my role in both of them. No longer am I just focused on sales and client development - today, I add marketing to the mix. As Matt wrote yesterday, with Jennifer Wilson's departure I become the SVP of sales and marketing, and I am more than ready to embrace the new challenges and opportunities that role brings.

I'll be looking for ways to synergize our sales and marketing efforts - making both of them more effective. I'll also be on a mission to expand my view of the email world under the marketing lens. I'm sure there will be lots of "ah-ha" moments as I discover what I know, what I don't know, and all the things in between.

For my peers out there for whom this is old hat - tell me what to avoid, and maybe share a few gems. Tell me ...

Categories: News

Ch-ch-ch-ch Changes

By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman

For those of you who have known Return Path for a long time, you know that Jennifer Wilson has been here running the show for our marketing (and various other things on and off) since we acquired Veripost back in 2001 -- and for Veripost for a year before that. Jennifer is leaving the company next week as she prepares for her second baby and a full-time career as a mom.

It's often said that the five stages of emotional response to a loss are: (1) denial, (2) bargaining, (3) anger, (4) despair, (5) acceptance. I never really hit "anger" when Jennifer decided to switch careers, but I sure cycled through the other four (just ask her about the bargaining sometime for a good laugh). Jennifer has been an incredibly valuable part of our team here and will be sorely missed. ...

Categories: News

A New (Old) Marketing Blog

By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman

Andy Sernovitz's very cleverly-named Damn, I Wish I'd Thought of That is back, this time in blog and RSS feed format as well as, of course, email newsletter format. Andy is a Return Path alum and does a great job of crystallizing smart and clever ideas for marketers into manageable nuggets, particularly around viral and word-of-mouth marketing (Andy wrote a great book on WOM marketing, which I reviewed on my personal blog).

He was nice enough to interview me for his blog. As a teaser, Andy asked me (and a bunch of other people) three questions ...

Categories: News

Doing Well by Doing Good, Part 3

By The Return Path Habitat for Humanity Team

As part of its commitment to community service, Return Path has sponsored two teams of people to go to New Orleans to assist Habitat for Humanity in the post-Katrina and Rita clean up and rebuilding effort. Our colleague Tom Bartel wrote about the experience in helping with the clean up team last year. And just last week six of us (Russ Bird, Dan Deneweth, Lisa Filipek, Ezra Fischer, Stephanie Miller and Melinda Plemel) headed down to the Crescent City and found there is still very much to be done more than 15 months after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Here's a quick glimpse at our efforts, to give you an idea of the daily struggles still faced in the New Orleans area. ...

Categories: News

Silly, Silly Patent Nonsense

By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman

Some news floated around the email marketing world yesterday that is potentially disturbing and destructive but highlights some lunacy at the same time. I hope I'm getting enough of the details right here (and quite frankly that isn't a joke, which it feels like).

Tom DiStefano of Boca-based PerfectWeb Technologies is suing direct marketing behemoth InfoUSA for patent infringement of a business process patent for bulk email distribution that he received in 2003.

I will first issue my disclaimers that I'm not a patent lawyer (nor do I even play one on TV) and that I have only quickly read both the legal complaint and the patent. But my general take on this is that it's more silly than anything else -- but has the potential to be destructive at the same time. ...

Categories: News

Stuck in the Middle

By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman

I was trying to explain the current state of Return Path's Postmaster Network online advertising business (email lists, lead gen, RSS) to someone from outside the industry the other day, when it occurred to me that many online marketing vehicles are still split between running on the offline paradigm and running on the online paradigm. I don't have a lot of detailed stats on all of this at my fingertips, but bear with my observations.

To me, the offline paradigm has always been characterized by big agency buys, driven by thematic/brand oriented creative campaigns that cost a fortune to develop. This is even true to a large extent for direct marketing, although the mechanics are different. It's relied on lots of third party intermediaries to connect the audience (or more specifically, estimates of the audience) to the marketer. It has paid all of these people on a percentage of the media spend, which is so massive that a 10% override on it can keep you in business and be dissociated from effort expended or value created. Many of the original forms of online media -- banners, lists -- still operate partially in this world. This part of the online ad market is growing, but more slowly than others.

Contrast this with the online paradigm ...

Categories: News

Forget the 30-Second Ad, Disruptive Advertising is Dead

By Craig Swerdloff
VP and GM of Customer Acquisition Solutions

Joe Marchese, author of Online Spin, recently wrote "Advertising is changing from the buying and selling of people's attention with only implied consent, to a system requiring explicit consent of the people."

I would argue that consent for advertising was never implied. Rather it was assumed that consumers of content understood the value of such content and would tolerate advertising in exchange for it remaining free. In today's world there is a growing abundance of free, original content and consumers are less willing to participate in the exchange. A great example of this is YouTube, which has yet to figure out how to package pre-roll advertising around video content without causing a mass exodus of consumers. Another example is TiVo, which has television viewers blasting past the ads to get to the content.

Explicit consent is the future of all advertising. ...

Categories: News

It's Not Rock and Roll, But We Like It

By Tami Monahan Forman
Director, Customer Marketing

Our friends at Blue Sky Factory have a relatively new podcast called ROI Radio. In the most recent episode they interviewed our own Matt Blumberg, which he reports was a lot of fun. The 30-minute chat focuses on Return Path, where things are headed for us and even about the growth and development of RSS and feed technology and FeedBurner. It's a fun listen during a lunch break.

Of course, you can also subscribe to it through iTunes or sign up for their blog feed and have the newest episodes delivered straight to you. If you are involved in online media in any way, it's definitely worth a listen.

Categories: News

Help Us, Help You: Take Our Reader Survey

By Tami Monahan Forman
Director, Customer Marketing

We want to provide you the most valuable email marketing blog possible, and we could use your help to do so. Help us give you more of what you want -- and less of what you don't -- by taking our survey and telling us what you think about the content, frequency and topics in our blog. It will only take about seven minutes to complete, and you may even win a $50 Amazon gift card for your time.

Please take the survey today!

Categories: News