Why Publishing Will Never Be the Same, Part II In Part I of this series, I talked about our experience at Return Path publishing a book back in January through a new type of print-on-demand, or self-publishing house called iUniverse and why I thought the publishing industry was in for a long, slow decline unless it changes its ways. We had another interesting experience with iUniverse more recently that reinforces this point. It turns out, although iUniverse is mainly a “self publisher,” they also have a traditional publishing model called their Star Program, which includes an editorial review process. The good news for us is that they contacted us and said they liked our book so much, and sales are…
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Compression
Compression I had one of those "aha" moments the other day when I saw these powerful charts for the first time. It’s not that I didn’t realize that we humans have been adopting new technologies faster and faster over the last century (that would be a "duh" moment). It’s that I didn’t realize just how much faster the adoption had gotten relative to other technologies. The first chart here, from a report issued by the Dallas branch of the Federal Reserve, shows the U.S. household penetration of new technologies on the vertical axis and years from date of introduction on the horizontal axis. And in case that wasn’t a clear enough visual representation, here’s the critical tabular data. It just…
Why Publishing Will Never Be the Same, Part I
Why Publishing Will Never Be the Same, Part I As you may know, we published a book earlier this year at Return Path called Sign Me Up! Sales are going quite well, in case you’re wondering, and we also launched the book’s official web site, where you can subscribe to our “email best practices” newsletter. The process of publishing the book was fascinating and convinced me that publishing will never be the same. Even in two parts, this will be a long post, so apologies in advance. Front to back, the process went something like this: – We wrote the content and selected and prepared the graphics – We hired iUniverse to publish the book for a rough total cost…
Email and Business Development: Two Great Tastes…
Email and Business Development: Two Great Tastes… Interestingly, Chris Baggott offers compelling evidence for the opposite view he intended in his recent posting claiming email is not an acquisition tool. I respect Chris as a thought leader in the email marketing services industry and am a fan of what he and his colleagues have done in building Exact Target, but I think he’s dead wrong on this one. Email is a phenomenal customer retention tool, no question about it. I totally agree with the claim that website owners should never let a prospect escape from their website without signing up for an email program. It’s very true that spending money on website traffic can go to waste if a browser…
My RSS Feed
My RSS Feed In an effort to manage my blog and RSS feed a little better, I’d like to request that anyone who gets my RSS feed NOT via Feedburner — that is, via the default Typepad feed — resubscribe to the Feedburner feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/Onlyonce. Thanks!
A Ball Bearing in the Wheels of E-Commerce
A Ball Bearing in the Wheels of E-Commerce As an online marketing professional, I’ve long understood intellectually how e-commerce works, how affiliate networks function, and why the internet is such a powerful selling tool. But I got an email the other day that drove this home more directly. When I started my blog about a year and a half ago, I set myself up as an Amazon affiliate, meaning that any time someone clicks on a link to Amazon from one of my postings or on the blog sidebar, I get paid a roughly 4% commission on anything that person buys on Amazon on that session. According to the email report I just got from Amazon on Q2 sales driven…
Beyond CAN-SPAM: The Nightmare Continues
Beyond CAN-SPAM: The Nightmare Continues Turn back the clock to the end of 2003. A bunch of states had recently passed their own anti-spam bills, and California had just passed the then-notorious SB186. Commercial emailers were freaking out because compliance with a patchwork of state laws for email is nearly impossible given the nature of email and given the differences between the laws. The reult of the freakout was an expedited, and decent, though far from perfect, federal law called CAN-SPAM which, among other things, preempted most of the individual state laws under the interstate commerce clause. Most of us noted that the federal government had never worked so swiftly in recent memory. Now it’s mid-2005, and a new cycle…
New Del.icio.us for: Tag
New Del.icio.us for: Tag As usual the laggard behind Fred and Brad, I just set up a for:mattblumberg tag on del.icio.us. Feel free to tag away for me! If you don’t know what this means, you can read either of their postings about it here or here.
Wanted: VP Marketing – A-Players Only!
Wanted: VP Marketing – A-Players Only! I’m going to try an experiment and post a job description on my blog. We’ll see how this works! Return Path is looking for its next head of marketing. Jennifer Wilson, our current and long-standing VP Marketing, is going out on maternity leave in the fall and is going to return afterwards in a part-time capacity, so we’re looking for someone new to join the team and help take the company to the next level. Most of the details are in the job description, but the vitals are: – Based in NYC or Denver, CO – Must have previous experience running a marketing effort – Mix of B2C and B2B, but B2B is probably…
Sender Score: Credit Scores for Emailers
Sender Score: Credit Scores for Emailers Yesterday, I wrote about email authentication, and why, although it’s great, it won’t stop spam without the emergence and scaling of accreditation and reputation systems. Today, Return Path has announced the beta launch of Sender Score, our new reputation management system. Sender Score is a groundbreaking service that we’ve been working on for a long time here. The best way to think about it (or the analog analog, as Brad might say) is as a FICO or credit score for email. We’ve gone out and compiled TONS of data about emailers, much as the credit bureaus do when they gather financial profile and transaction data about individuals and businesses. But our data, when aggregated…
Why We Love Email Authentication, But Why It Won’t Stop Spam
Why We Love Email Authentication, But Why It Won’t Stop Spam Microsoft made a big announcement today that they’re taking email authentication, in the form of Sender ID, very seriously. They’re using a stick, not a carrot. Emailers who do not publish a proper Sender ID record are now going to (a) find themselves in the bulk mail folder at Hotmail and MSN, and (b) have a big fat disclaimer thrown on top of their emails from Microsoft warning users that the email’s source can’t be authenticated. At Return Path, we’re big fans of authentication, and we’re sponsoring the upcoming Email Authentication Summit in a couple of weeks in New York as one way of supporting the effort — encouraging…