So, Where’d They Go? As we’ve reported a couple times in the past, one of our interesting nuggets at Return Path is a wealth of “ISP switching data” that comes from our very large, active, self-reported Email Change of Address, or ECOA, service (consumer sign-up; client info). I noted the article floating around last week that AOL lost about 1 million subscribers last quarter, the lion’s share in the U.S., of course. So, where’d they all go? Well, according to our ECOA data, which may of course be somewhat skewed by our data sources (but has data from well over 1 million consumers each quarter), AOL users defected as follows: To Yahoo! — 42.5% To broadband providers in aggregate (cable,…
Category
Conference Overload
Conference Overload Our little email/online marketing industry is overrun with conferences. It’s completely out of control. I’m surprised no one else has started complaining or blogging about it, so let me be the first. Here’s an incomplete inventory of but a few months of what our team is attending: February — DKIM Implentation Summit, MAAWG, DMA Financial Services Conference, RSA March — DMA Leaders Forum, ARF Annual April — ESPC Deliverability Boot Camp, Email Authentication Summit, Marketing Sherpa, DMA Direct Marketing to Business Conference, MRA 20th Anniversary Show May — Catalog Conference, Mediapost’s Email Insider Summit, ISPCON, INBOX June — DoubleClick/Epsilon Email Conference, DM Days, MAAWG, Ad:Tech, MRA Annual, AMA ART, CASRO Plus a few other smaller local events and…
Counter Cliche: Pick a Geek Term
Counter Cliche: Pick a Geek Term Fred has a good cliche this week — he talks about how an organization has a particular "clock speed" and needs to hire people who can operate at that speed. I agree whole-heartedly but have always referred to this exact thing in a different way. We have always said when we’ve acquired another company that we need to "port that company onto our Operating System." So pick your favorite geek term, but I like the notion of porting someone to another operating system better because it implies that people can change a little bit more.
A New Season for Bonded Sender (now Sender Score Certified)
A New Season for Bonded Sender (now Sender Score Certified) (With apologies to my non-email industry readers for such a long detailed posting) Ah, spring. New life is everywhere. Winter clothes are being put away, birds are returning from their winters in the south, flowers are blooming. We at Return Path are doing our part by announcing the “rebirth” of our Bonded Sender Program, the Internet’s largest and oldest email accreditation program, or whitelist, as Sender Score Certified. Since we acquired Bonded Sender last fall, we’ve had the opportunity to go on a “listening tour” – talking to marketers, publishers, ESPs, ISPs, spam filtering companies, system administrators, email appliance manufacturers – you name it. What we learned was that the…
An Undignified End to an Internet Pioneer
An Undignified End to an Internet Pioneer I was one of Wingspan Bank’s first customers when they opened their online banking system as a division of Bank One back in 1997 or so. Wingspan closed its doors and merged with Bank One probably about 6 years ago now, with (if I remember correctly) only 77,000 customers — obviously, the world had changed a lot, and online banking no longer required a dedicated “online bank.” Even after Wingspan closed, I kept my Wingspan-turned-Bank One account, although there wasn’t much money in it and I didn’t really use it for much of anything. Finally, last week, I decided to close the account — easy, I figured, since Bank One had merged with…
At What Price False Positives?
At What Price False Positives? As has been covered in many places, including Direct and The Wall Street Journal, Verizon settled a lawsuit yesterday over “too aggressive” spam filtering, or what we in the business call false positives — filtering out legitimate, non-spam emails as spam. This is a huge problem that part of our business at Return Path, our Delivery Assurance Solutions group, has been fighting for years. The gist of the settlement is that Verizon is changing the way it filters spam to make sure more legitimate mail gets through, and that it is refunding various small amounts of money or free months of service to customers who complained about the problem. I am NOT a believer in…
A New Member of the Internet Axis of Evil
A New Member of the Internet Axis of Evil Fred has written a series of postings over the years about the Internet Axis of Evil, roughly in order here, here, here, here, and here (I’m sure I missed some). The basis of the postings is great — that, as Fred says: There’s a downside to an open network. It’s the same downside that exists in an open society. There are a lot of nuts out there who want to do bad things (the evildoers as George W Bush calls them). And we all have to spend a lot of time and money making sure that we are protected from them. It’s a huge burden on an open network and an…
Agile Marketing
Agile Marketing As I wrote about last week, Return Path has been using the Agile Development methodology and Rally Software as our product development framework for about a year now. It’s worked so well for us, that the concepts, and even the tools, have started to spread virally to other parts of our business. About two months ago, I took over our marketing department as interim CMO. Our marketing efforts have become increasingly complex in the last year or so as we’ve grown and added multiple new product lines, and as a result, the demands on our relatively small department were becoming unmanageable. As I wrote about a couple years ago, Marketing is like French Fries — you can always…
Memory Lane or Dark Alley?
Memory Lane or Dark Alley? We had an interesting meeting today. A small group of the old-timers at Return Path, including one of our founders who doesn’t work at the company any longer, convened a summit to brainstorm ways to reinvent our original, original business, Email Change of Address (ECOA). For those of you who don’t know what it is, ECOA is a very simple idea — that people who change email addresses need help updating their personal and business contacts, and also their most trusted commercial email newsletter relationships. It’s a free service for consumers, and a paid service for opt-in email marketers and publishers who use our service to reacquire their customers with renewed permission and a shiny…
Agile Development
Agile Development Sometime last year, our engineering and product teams embraced the Agile Software Development framework. Without going into too much detail (here’s the Wikipedia entry for those who want it), the concept of Agile Development is to run software development in small pieces with a focus on more communication between product and development teams resulting in collaborative requirements development. This leads to a “release early and often” environment where there are continual improvements. For us, we group development projects now into a “release” that consists of a series of usually six, two-week “iterations.” The release planning and iteration planning meetings are reasonably long meetings that involve the major stakeholders, product management and engineering. The process also includes a very…
Victory for Email: AOL Enhanced Whitelist to Stay
Victory for Email: AOL Enhanced Whitelist to Stay It’s official. AOL will keep its organic Enhanced Whitelist, clarifying that is not planning on replacing it with Goodmail’s email stamp program. Goodmail will now be ONE way, not the only way, to reach AOL inboxes. Charles Stiles, the postmaster for AOL, confirmed this earlier today on the phone with me, and I announced the news on CNBC’s Power Lunch (view the clip here). This is a huge win for all companies who strive to do email the right way, earning the solid reputations that drive deliverability and response rates. Paying for inbox reach is akin to only having paid search engine marketing – it works for some business models, not others;…