May
08
By Bonnie Malone Fry
Director, Strategic Services
With Mother's Day coming this weekend, I've been thinking a lot about "Mommy marketing." Pregnancy, childbirth and new parenthood offer a predictable set of challenges that makes this audience a natural for lifecycle marketing. And, are you surprised to hear us say this, a natural for email.
A colleague of mine recently had a baby and she was struck by how many companies spent a lot of money purchasing her name and then sending her direct mail - including samples! - but didn't build in an email component.
Let's take a look at a few of the big companies, what they did and what they could have done better
Tell me moreCategories: Response
May
07
By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman
A few years back when we launched our blog, we disabled the comments feature because we got far too much spam and far too little actual conversation. Boy am I sorry for that! My post last week, Drawing the Line, drew a number of insightful comments by email. With the permission of those readers I'm going to share some of those comments here. (Meanwhile, a mirror post on my personal blog, OnlyOnce, drew a few public comments with similar themes.) Look for a third post in a few days which outlines where we come out on the debate.
The overwhelming consensus was that we should not treat legal businesses in "sin" industries any different than any other business. This position was articulated best by Dean F. Sutherland who wrote: "Stick to email practices and legality. Leave questions of morality to the private decisions of private folks. After all, one man's morality is another man's bad joke... and vice versa."
In fact, writer Thomas Kellar cited automobiles, insurance and pharmaceuticals, among others, as industries that might also be considered sinful. He, along with a few other writers, objected to the inclusion of guns on our list, which are protected by the Second Amendment.
Ed Levinson posed the question ...
Tell me moreCategories: Deliverability
May
06
By Anita Absey
SVP, Sales & Marketing
Last week I wrote about Return Path's Email Expert Seminar heading to Denver, Colorado. Well, in that same week we are also making a stop in Dallas, Texas.
The agenda for both seminars has been created to be super-informative and ultra-interactive. First, you will hear from our own email experts - Stephanie Miller, George Bilbrey and Bonnie Malone Fry - as they give you the lowdown on email reputation, subscriber experience and acquisition strategies. We then move into roundtables where you'll get to ask our experts the questions that keep you up at night. Our experts, along with your colleagues at the table, will help you think through new tactics to achieve your email marketing goals.
We've also lined up two great speakers in Dallas. ...
Categories: News
May
05
By Alex Rubin, VP, Business Development
and J.D. Falk, Director of Product Management, Receiver Products
We are very pleased to announce that Comcast now offers a complaint feedback loop, powered by Return Path. (For you deliverability nerds, you might note that we got beaten on this announcement by our friends at Deliverability.com. We appreciate the plug!)
Those of us who work in the industry feel like everyone should, by now, grok what a feedback loop is and why it's so useful for both senders and end recipients of email. But we know that's not completely true yet, so this seems like a good time to review the history and initial purpose of feedback loops.
When a user clicks the "report spam" button (or equivalent) in their mail client, a copy of that message (a spam "complaint") is transmitted to their ISP. This type of system is generally only used by web-based mail clients such as Yahoo! Mail or Hotmail, or in custom desktop interfaces such as AOL's, though some anti-spam vendors offer plug-ins for Outlook or Thunderbird. The ISP can use these reports, in aggregate, to update and improve their spam filters. ...
Tell me moreCategories: Deliverability
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