Welcome to the new Return Path. For a tech company to grow and thrive in the 21st century it must be in a state of constant adaptation. We have been the global market leaders in email deliverability since my co-founder George Bilbrey coined that term back in 2002. In fact, back in 2008 we announced a major corporate reorganization, divesting ourselves of some legacy businesses in order to focus on deliverability as our core business. Since then Return Path has grown tremendously thanks to that focus, but we have grown to the point where it’s time for us to redefine ourselves once again. Now we’re launching a new chapter in the company’s history to meet evolving needs in our…
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Remembering J.D.
This is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to write in 12 years as Return Path’s CEO. I hope it never has an equal. One of our long-time employees, J.D. Falk, passed away last night after a year-long struggle with cancer. J.D., which most people don’t know was short for Jesse David, was only 37 years old. Although I cannot claim to be a close friend of J.D.’s, I have known him fairly well in the industry going back about eight years, and he has been a trusted member of our team here for the last four+ years. J.D. did great work for us at Return Path, but my admiration for him goes beyond that. I admire him first for…
Juxtaposition
Juxtaposition Once I stripped out the spam and the person:person emails from my inbox this morning, here were the five subject lines I was left with: Wall Street Journal: Osama Bin Laden is Dead [eCommerce company]: Final Hours to Shop Our Private Sale! Wall Street Journal: Bin Laden Was Killed in Abbottabad, Pakistan Official Says [Travel site]: Last minute deals from NYC and more! Wall Street Journal: Osama Bin Laden Buried at Sea Return Path (yes, my own company): Why Whitelisting is Important to Your Email Marketing Mix The cynic in me says “wow, nice timing on the email marketing.” I am guessing the attention and click-through on anything other than today’s big news will be greatly diminished. But the…
5 Ways to Spot Trends That Will Make You (and Your Business) More Successful
5 Ways to Spot Trends That Will Make You (and Your Business) More Successful I’ve recently started writing a column for The Magill Report, the new venture by Ken Magill, previously of Direct magazine and even more previously DMNews. Ken has been covering email for a long time and is one of the smartest journalists I know in this space. My column, which I share with my colleagues Jack Sinclair and George Bilbrey, covers how to approach the business of email marketing, thoughts on the future of email and other digital technologies, and more general articles on company-building in the online industry – all from the perspective of an entrepreneur. Below is a re-post of this week’s version, which I…
Investment in the Email Ecosystem
Investment in the Email Ecosystem Last week, my colleague George Bilbrey posted about how (turns out – shocking!) email still isn’t dead yet. Not only is he right, but the whole premise of defending email from the attackers who call it “legacy” or “uninteresting” is backwards. The inbox is getting more and more interesting these days, not less. At Return Path, we’ve seen a tremendous amount of startup activitiy and investment (these two things can go together but don’t have to) in in front end of email in the past couple years. I’d point to three sub-trends of this theme of “the inbox getting more interesting.” First, major ISPs and mailbox operators are starting to experiment with more interesting applications…
Automated Love
Automated Love Return Path is launching a new mini feature sometime this week to our clients. Normally I wouldn’t blog about this — I think this is mini enough that we’re probably not even saying much about it publicly at the company. But it’s an interesting concept that I thought I’d riff on a little bit. I forget what we’re calling the program officially — probably something like “Client Status Emails” or “Performance Summary Alerts” — but a bunch of us have been calling it by the more colorful term “Automated Love” for a while now. The art of account management or client services for an on-demand software company is complex and has evolved significantly from the old days of…
I Don’t Want to Be Your Friend (Today), part II
I think Facebook is starting to get out of control from a usability perspective. This doesn’t mean it’s not a great platform and that it doesn’t have utility. But if the platform continues on its current path, the core system runs the risk of going sideways like its various predecessors: GeoCities, MySpace, etc. Maybe I’ll go in there to look for something or someone, but it won’t be a place I scroll through as part of a daily or semi-daily routine. I wrote about this a year ago now, and while the site has some better tools to assign friends to groups, it doesn’t do any better job than it did a year ago about segregating information flow, either by group…
Why I Love Our New Product
Why I Love Our New Product Return Path officially announced a new product today called Domain Assurance, which I blogged a little bit about here. It’s a very exciting product that will help reduce and ultimately eliminate phishing emails – spam’s even more evil cousin that leads to identity theft, malware, further propagation of spam through botnets, and all sorts of other goodies. The product is in beta now with a bunch of top ISPs and brands. Those are a lot of reasons to love our new product. But for me, there’s more. For starters, this is the first new product (entirely new product, not just a feature or extension) that we’ve launched in years. While we’ve made some…
Not Dead Yet
Not Dead Yet Ah Spring. Flowers bloom. Love is in the air. And it’s time for the annual round of “email is dead” articles and blog posts. With apologies to Monty Python, and on the heels of last week’s fracas about social networking having more users than email, once again I say, email is Not Dead Yet! Three articles of late are pretty interesting and point out that the trends in online channel usage are far murkier than meets the eye. First, Sherry Chiger’s story in Direct that One in Five Merchants Shuns Marketing Email has a poor headline for an interesting, data-rich article. The article should be about how “Four in Five” adopt. The article has…
The Beginning of the DMA’s Next Chapter
The Beginning of the DMA’s Next Chapter As I wrote a few months back, I recently joined the DMA’s Board of Directors and its Executive Committee to try to help the association – one of the largest and highest profile groups representing marketers – advance its agenda in a few specific ways. At the time, I noted that my interests would be on consumer advocacy and engagement, execution around interactive marketing issues and the internet community, and transparency around the organization itself. Yesterday, John Greco, the association’s CEO, announced he is stepping down to make way for the next generation of leadership. John has done some great work the past five years running the DMA and has advanced…
Jump Starting Start Ups
As I mentioned in some recent posts, I’ve really enjoyed sharing the Return Path story with the tech start-up community in New York through groups like the NYC Lean Startup Meetup . Next week I’m taking the Return Path story on the road to Silicon Valley where I’ll be presenting to Startup2Startup. Startup2Startup is a group of Silicon Valley geeks, entrepreneurs, and investors dedicated to educating and helping the next generation of Internet startups. They meet monthly over dinner to discuss relevant topics in technology and entrepreneurship, connect with new people and companies, and share our knowledge and experience. You’ll not only get to hear about Return Path’s 10 years in business but I’ll also be sharing…