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Return Path is home to more experts on email marketing, email deliverability and sender reputation than any other company in the email industry. On this page you will find biographical information and, where available, high-res head shots and Twitter handles for our stable of email gurus.
Need an expert source for your story? Contact the Return Path Press Office.
Matt Blumberg founded Return Path in 1999 because he believed the world needed email to work better. Matt is passionate about enhancing the online relationship between email subscribers and marketers so that both sides of the equation benefit. It is with great pride that he has watched this initial creation grow to a company of 150 employees with the market leading brand, innovative products, and the email industry’s most renowned experts.
Before Return Path, Matt ran marketing, product management, and the internet group for MovieFone, Inc. (later acquired by AOL). Prior to that he served as an associate with private equity firm General Atlantic Partners and was a consultant with Mercer Management Consulting. He holds a B.A. from Princeton University.
You can learn much more about Matt by reading his email marketing and entrepreneurship blog Only Once -- one of the first CEO blogs on the Internet.
Anita is a veteran of the interactive marketing industry and has built her experience leading successful teams at Axciom, Abacus Direct and DoubleClick. A self-proclaimed "data junkie," Anita has helped hundreds of leading marketers integrate data and technology to build profitable marketing programs.
Anita joined Return Path in 2003, and is the leader of our global sales and service teams, planning and implementing all sales and service activities in order to meet our goals for retention, growth and profitability. She holds a B.A. in economics from Fordham University.
Tom Bartel helped to define email deliverability as a service when he co-founded Assurance Systems with George Bilbrey in 2002. He has been with Return Path since its acquisition of Assurance Systems in 2003 where he now leads the Return Path Certification Program, the most widely accepted email whitelist available today. He also serves as Chief Privacy Officer, ensuring Return Path and their clients understand and adhere to industry regulations and best practices.
With long experience in email services and technology, Tom has held senior positions at Email Publishing, MessageMedia, and DoubleClick. He is certified by the IAPP as a Certified Information Privacy Professional and holds a B.A. in speech communications from Colorado State University.
George Bilbrey is the founder of the industry’s first deliverability service provider, Assurance Systems, which merged with Return Path in 2003. He is a recognized expert on the subjects of email reputation and deliverability and is active in many industry organizations, including the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG) and the Online Trust Alliance (OTA). In his role as president of Return Path George is the driving force behind the ongoing innovation of our products and services.
Prior to Return Path, George served as Director of Product Management at Worldprints.com and as a partner in the telecommunications group at Mercer Management Consulting. He holds a B.A. in economics from Duke University, and an MBA from the Kenan-Flagler School of Business, University of North Carolina.
You can learn much more about George by reading his email technology and entrepreneurship blog Monkey Mind Labs.
Stephanie works with marketers to increase email response rates and improve the overall ROI of their email programs. With over 10 years of marketing and consulting experience, Stephanie has built and managed interactive marketing programs for direct marketing and media businesses.
Stephanie began her career in the online industry at America Online where she directed web redesigns, managed email newsletter programs and pioneered wireless web applications. Following her success at AOL, Stephanie joined BMG Columbia House to lead email and web product marketing efforts to increase online CD and DVD club sales. Her accomplishments with BMG Columbia House include launching an innovative subscription based music club product and email marketing program.
J.D. Falk has worked on email and anti-spam systems and policies for more than fifteen years, including such influential companies as the original Mail Abuse Prevention System, Microsoft, and Yahoo!. While at Microsoft, J.D. devised network-level anti-spam technology which cut the level of inbound spam connections in half - at least for a little while. At Yahoo!, he worked closely with the creators of DomainKeys and DKIM, and managed the creation of their outbound and inbound compliant feedback loop systems.
J.D. has also been active in policy matters as a long-time board member of the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email, and has been very active in the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (http://www.maawg.org/) since 2005; he is currently MAAWG's Document Editor, and fills Return Path's seat on the Board of Directors. More recently J.D. has moved from the sidelines to participate in the Internet Engineering Task Force, primarily in the DKIM and MARF working groups. Along with writing for Return Path, J.D.'s articles have been published by CircleID, CAUCE, and IEEE Internet Computing. He is the initial instigator and remains the only non-anonymous contributor to BoxofMeat.net.
Margaret uses her extensive knowledge of email campaign strategy and branding to help marketers grow their subscriber base, improve program relevancy and increase lifetime value of their email customers.
Prior to Return Path, Margaret spent 10 years producing and managing multi-channel integrated direct marketing programs for Fortune 100 companies, focusing on the financial services and technology sectors. She most recently held a senior-level marketing position with Strategic Communications, Inc., a marketing/communications agency in Boston.
Previous experience also includes project management and editorial roles at SchoolSports, Inc., publisher of RISE Magazine, the nation's leading sports and active lifestyle magazine for teens (formerly SchoolSports Magazine), and SchoolSports.com.
Richard works from the Return Path UK office managing the relationships with channel partners, predominately email technology providers. He is also a long-standing Email Marketing Council member, and since 2004 he has Chaired the Benchmarking Hub. He also worked with IAB (Internet Advertising Bureau) to organise a joint event: Email Marketing: Art or Science. He has regularly contributed to trade press articles, blogs and a book on the topic of email marketing and has chaired and spoken at UK-DMA events as well as presenting DMA research in several European countries. In 2005 he was voted by B2B Marketing Magazine as one of the top twenty opinion formers in the UK.
Prior to joining Return Path in April 2009 he was Commercial Director for RSA Direct and has many years direct and interactive marketing experience.
Chad joined Return Path in a direct sales role in 2000. Over the years, he played a leading role in growing Return Path offerings from a single ECOA product to a suite of email deliverability, reputation and response services. In March of 2005, he was promoted to Vice President and in 2009 expanded his responsibilities to lead the North American client services organization.
Prior to Return Path, he held sales positions at Hershey Foods and McLane, a subsidiary of Wal-Mart. Chad holds a B.S. in business management from California Lutheran University.
With 10 years of marketing and merchandising experience, Bonnie has managed multi-channel, multi-million dollar businesses for Fortune 100 companies in the retail sector. Her knowledge of merchandising, customer buying behavior and email campaign strategy have been instrumental in positioning her clients as thought-leaders in their marketplace while instilling brand loyalty, building subscriber lists and improving ROI. Her programs have experienced a 20-40% increase in open and click-through rates, 50-85% revenue growth, and 40-60% database growth.
She most recently held a senior-level e-marketing position with Office Depot, a multi-channel retailer of office supplies, technology, and furniture, where she spent eight years. Previous experience also includes merchandise buying and international brand marketing. Bonnie holds a BS in Merchandising from Florida State University.
Sam Masiello oversees Return Path's strategy for products aimed at keeping the email channel secure for consumers, corporations and Internet Service Providers. He also serves as the company's Chief Security Officer. Most recently, Sam served as Director of Messaging Security Research of McAfee's Global Threat Intelligence team. In that role he was in charge of research across the full spectrum of email-borne threats. This included identifying the latest email and internet threats, as well as predicting future threat trends, in order to safeguard the millions of businesses and individuals who rely on McAfee solutions. Sam's previous role was vice president of Information Security at MX Logic, which McAfee acquired in 2009. Sam is a highly sought-after expert, having been interviewed on radio and television, and quoted in publications such as The New York Times, USA Today, SC Magazine, MSNBC, FOX News and more. Earlier in his career, Sam held a variety of positions with Synacor, an ISP premium services provider, including project manager, software developer and manager of quality assurance. Masiello also served as a software developer for Client Logic, an outsourced services company. Masiello earned his Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science with honors from the State University of New York at Buffalo.
As a Director for Return Path's Response Consulting group, Julia works with clients to increase the ROI of their email programs by optimizing the subscriber experience. With over 10 years of online marketing experience, she uses her knowledge of email content development, segmentation, web analytics, and online contact strategy to ensure clients are engaging their audience, increasing their subscriber lists, and ultimately, generating revenue and sales leads.
Most recently, she was an online marketing manager for Sun Microsystems (now Oracle), a Fortune 500 company that provides network computing infrastructure solutions. Julia was responsible for developing and managing global, multi-language online campaigns and e-newsletters. While at Sun, her email programs generated a multi-million dollar marketing pipeline. She also increased newsletter reach by 25% and boosted click-through rates by 37%.
In addition, Julia is a Marketing Experiments Certified Email Optimization Professional and received her MA in International Studies from the University of Denver. Julia is based out of Return Path's Colorado office.
Michelle and her team work with the world’s top marketers to understand and implement best practice based strategy to optimize email deliverability, grow their lists and increase ROI for every email they send. Michelle recently transitioned from her prior role at Return Path as Senior Director of Client Services, managing the Platinum service team and overseeing all accounts.
Before joining Return Path, Michelle was the Director of Client Services for ColdSpark, a provider of enterprise infrastructure solutions for email processing and delivery. She has also served as lead Technical Account Manager for both DoubleClick and MessageMedia supporting email marketing initiatives for IBM, Cisco, Intuit and others. She is the co-chair of the Email Experience Council’s Deliverability & Rendering Roundtable. Michelle holds a B.S. in psychology from the University of Maryland.
With 12 years in the industry, Melinda Plemel is well versed in email happenings. She has worked with ESP, Experian (before its connection to CheetahMail) and is currently involved in the Collaboration committee at MAAWG (www.MAAWG.com). Melinda has been working at Return Path for 6 years and is currently the Senior Receiver Relationship Manager responsible for managing partners that join Return Path's Receiver Alliance. She is the key to helping and educating Return Path on mailbox providers, anti-spam, and email technology trends, as well as to educating receivers about everything Return Path has to offer. When Melinda isn't helping to make the world safer for email, she spends her time volunteering for Habit for Humanity.
As Director of Professional Services, Matt Rausenberger leads a team of the email industry's thought leaders responsible for providing email deliverability consulting to the world's top marketers. Matt's team is charged with working together to define industry best practices, solve complex deliverability issues and develop new tools and techniques for achieving the highest deliverability possible for Return Path's clients.
Prior to joining Return Path, Matt was the Chief Operating Officer for MindWorks, a professional services firm providing enterprise software consulting to numerous Fortunate 100 clients. Under Matt's leadership, MindWorks was twice named to Inc. Magazine's list of Top 500 Privately Held Companies and was recognized as one of the fastest growing privately owned companies in Northern Colorado.
Additionally, Matt spent nine years at Cisco Systems as Senior Manager in Corporate Marketing and was an application developer and data analyst at Apple Computer for three years. Matt received a B.B.A. in Management Information Systems from the University of Texas at Austin.
Tom Sather is an email deliverability consultant for Return Path where he works with top-brand clients like eBay, MySpace, IBM and Twitter. Tom's previous experience includes stints with email service provider Experian and work on the abuse desks for AOL, Bellsouth, AT&T, and GTE. Tom uses his knowledge of ISPs, spam filters and deliverability rules to advise marketers on how to get their email delivered to the inbox and generate the highest possible response. Tom's clients have seen an average increase of 20% in deliverability rates
Ken Takahashi joined Return Path in 2006 to launch the company's international growth efforts and has since overseen the company's global channel partner business and was named Vice President of Corporate Development in 2010. His team is responsible for forging strategic relationships and developing opportunities for Return Path to expand into new products, geographies and market segments.
He joined Return Path from DoubleClick's email division (which was later acquired by Epsilon) where he served as Vice President of Strategic Partnerships responsible for global partnerships. He also ran the industry's first international email deliverability team located throughout North America, Europe and the Asia Pacific region. The start of his email industry tenure began at MessageMedia, an early era email service provider, over a decade ago. He has spent a majority of that time fighting spam and advocating on behalf of legitimate online marketing communities around the world.
Ken has been an active leader on the board of directors to the Online Trust Alliance, is a frequent industry speaker, editorial contributor, and advisor to companies in the email and interactive marketing space. He holds a Bachelors of Science degree from the Leonard N. Stern School of Business at New York University.
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