Killer Email Industry Stats

By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman

In case you missed it, the Direct Marketing Association's outstanding research department recently released some interesting reports (link so you can see the details of reports available to purchase). In particular, two stats jumped out at me:

• Email marketing in the US alone will account for approximately 71,000 jobs this year, growing at 8-10% annually historically and projected into the future as well
• The ROI for email marketing is $57.25 for every dollar spent. The ROI of all non-email online marketing is $22.52, less than half

This jives with something we heard a few years ago from one of our clients ...

Categories: News

ClickZ Marketing Excellence Awards

By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman

We are proud to be nominated for this year's ClickZ Marketing Excellence Awards in two categories: Email Innovation of the Year, for Sender Score Reputation Monitor, and Best Deliverability Service for Sender Score, overall. We are particularly excited about the recognition of our Sender Score Reputation Monitor innovation which was many years in the making and a real first-of-its-kind for mailers. By scoring all email senders' reputations we make it possible for marketers to "see" their program the way that ISPs and other receivers do. This gives marketers a much easier way to evaluate the health of their email program.

Categories: News

Sign Me Up! Gets Updated

By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman

As many readers of this blog know, Return Path wrote a book last year titled Sign Me Up! Our intention was to help marketers at all levels think through how they could best use email to build their businesses and increase revenue and give them a bunch of practical tips they could implement across a number of critical elements of their email programs.

This year, our publisher iUniverse gave us an opportunity to update the book and give us some additional marketing support, which will hopefully culminate in placement of the book in your nearest Barnes & Noble location. iUniverse is actually publishing the book, as opposed to us self-publishing, which means our content has passed some sort of editorial muster. New York Times bestseller list, look out!

The best part of publishing a revised edition is that we took the opportunity to add in some great new and more current information that can benefit all email marketers. ...

Categories: News

Moving Fast ... financially speaking

By Rob Mattes
Chief Financial Officer

We just received some more great news – Return Path ranked #4 on Deloitte's New York Technology Fast 50 list! The list is based upon revenue growth over the past 5 years. This is another strong achievement for us to be proud of, on the heels of being selected #167 in the Inc 500 list, and a solid follow up to our #3 ranking on Deloitte’s list last year.

During the award presentation last week, Deloitte played a video of CEOs from the top 10 companies responding to various questions about their companies. Matt did a great job representing Return Path and clearly articulating how we are fortunate to have the attributes needed to grow a company: passionate employees, solid investors and of course, great customers.

Categories: News

Getting Good Inc

By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman

Anyway, Return Path was very fortunate to be ranked #167 in this year's Inc. Magazine Inc. 500 list of the fastest growing private companies in America. See the list here and our press release here. We were also happy to see clients of ours like Constant Contact and Zappos on the list, as well as fellow email companies Exact Target, Vertical Response, and research panel Epocrates. That's all the sign of a healthy industry! ...

Categories: News

Return Path Scores Top 3 Draft Picks

By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman

This must be what a professional sports team feels like when it finds itself with three picks in the first round of the draft. By adding stars to an already-solid franchise, you can do more, do it faster, and do it better than you were already doing things. Today, Return Path announces the hiring of three email gurus. Each brings a different skill set to the team, each is vitally important to our scalability and success, and each is a well-respected industry leader.

Heather Palmer Goff is moving to Colorado to join us as our VP of Client Management and Deliverability Consulting. Heather, of Responsys fame, will be managing our Sender Score program ....

Categories: News

Stop the presses: Gmail ads don't steal customers

By Ed Taussig
Director of Software Development

There has been some media hype lately about contextual - and often competitive - ads displaying in the web interfaces surrounding your email messages, particularly in Gmail. As marketers ponder whether to send email to Gmail customers at all, we decided to take a look at our Postmaster Network response rates to see if we could spot any issues lending credence to the hype.

The result: don't even think about taking Gmail customers off your list. People using Gmail responded BETTER than those using other ISPs. In fact, response rates were ...

Categories: News

SBC Transitioning to AT&T's Email Infrastructure

By Dan Deneweth
Director of Product Management, Delivery Assurance Solutions

Since the merger of SBC and AT&T late last year, SBC has been busy making changes to their email infrastructure. Previously a member of the Yahoo's email network, SBC has been transitioning email accounts to the AT&T infrastructure.

It's not clear how long this transition will take to complete, but we are already seeing significant changes in how email into some SBC accounts is being handled. For example, delivery of email campaigns is now subject to AT&T rules rather than Yahoo's. Previously, if a campaign was bulked at Yahoo, it would also be bulked at SBC. This is no longer the case for accounts that have been transitioned to the new infrastructure. You could now see campaigns being bulked at Yahoo and not SBC (or vice versa).

Overall, we have not noticed any significant impacts on deliverability to SBC accounts. However, there are a few notable differences to keep in mind ....

Categories: News

Doing well by doing good, part 2

By: Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman

Today we announced our Sender Score Certifed Nonprofit program, making official the policy we've always held about accreditation: if nonprofits can qualify, they should enjoy the same benefits as commercial mailers. Even if they can't afford to "pay to play".

Though nominal, the fees associated with Sender Score Certified have kept many nonprofit organizations from seeking acceptance -- despite the fact that there have never been licensing fees for nonprofits, even when the program first launched as Bonded Sender years ago. The perceived hassles of application time and effort are also now non-issues, since we shortened the application process for everyone when re-launching Bonded Sender ....

Categories: News

Email Budget Redux

By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman

Email marketing can seem like one big chicken-and-egg syndrome. Which comes first - the money to execute a quality program, or the results needed to earn those internal dollars? Read my column in Email Insider today for some ideas on how to improve results cost effectively, giving you the ammunition you need to fight for the bigger email budget you need to drive significant change.

Categories: News