Will Self Regulation of Email Continue?

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 ...

Categories: News

Get Smarter on Social Media

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 ...

Categories: News

Senders No More

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 ...

Categories: News

Return Path Twitterview with Simon O'Day from eServices

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. ...

Categories: News

Practicing What We Preach

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. ...

Categories: News

THIRTY-ONE PERCENT OF ONLINE RETAILERS SIGNED UP CUSTOMERS TO THEIR EMAIL LISTS WITHOUT REQUESTING PERMISSION, ACCORDING TO NEW RETURN PATH STUDY

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 ...

Categories: News

Photos of our new office in Colorado

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 ...

Categories: News

Clients, We Hear You!

By Anita Absey
SVP, Sales & Marketing

We take our clients seriously here at Return Path. When they have a problem, we'll do our best to fix it. When they have a great idea we look into how we can make it happen.

Part of taking clients seriously, of course, is taking every opportunity to listen to them. Which means we try to make it easy for our clients to talk to us. And so Return Path is announcing our User Group Meetings for this year, hosted in each of our three US offices: Broomfield, CO; Mountain View, CA; New York, NY.

Clients, want to be the first to hear insider information about industry trends and corporate news? Want to know ...

Categories: News

Will I See You at the Email Evolution Conference?

By Stephanie Miller
VP, Global Market Development

Quick reminder that the Email Evolution Conference is fast approaching - and if you aren't signed up yet, use the discount code JAN09 to get a full conference pass for just $999. Now more than ever we all need new ideas, a stronger network and great case examples.

In addition to my session, which I wrote about earlier this month, our CEO Matt Blumberg will be on an all-star panel discussing deliverability. What are the latest challenges you need to worry about? What changes are the ISPs making to ...

Categories: News

Yahoo! Feedback Loop News

I am extremely excited to be able to announce the launch a new Yahoo! feedback loop powered by Return Path. We now provide feedback loop services for more than 60% of the of the largest internet service providers (ISPs), including Comcast, Cox, USA.net, and Mailtrust.

And, the launch of the Yahoo! feedback loop paves the way for full integration of Yahoo! onto Sender Score Certified ...

Categories: Email Deliverability | News