I’m Sorry, What Year Is It? My colleague Tami Forman saw the attached leaflet posted on the subway in NYC. I’m not sure which is funnier — that someone wrote it and put it up, or that two people ripped off the phone number to make follow-up calls. Fred, Brad, Greg, anyone interested?
Category
Prepping RSS for Prime Time, Part II
Prepping RSS for Prime Time, Part II David Daniels from Jupiter wrote a good article yesterday in ClickZ about RSS and email marketing. It reads like a response to comments he received after publishing his main report on this topic earlier in the month. He tackles three main points: spam/clutter, personalization, and the (impending) flood of vendors. It’s definitely worth a quick read if you care about the RSS/email debate and space. I addressed this topic a little bit last June here, although somehow I forgot about the personalization challenge. I think RSS is closer to prime time than it was then, but it’s still not quite ready to go toe to toe with email or other forms or more…
Convergence Continues
Convergence Continues So according to this article and this one, Acxiom is going to acquire Digital Impact in a much more friendly way (e.g., with more money) than InfoUSA was trying to last month. This will probably be mixed news for DI employees, but it’s certainly good news for the email sector overall. It builds on and extends the trend that really got going in the last 12 months for the big offline direct marketing companies to more fully embrace email as an integrated part of the DM mix for their clients. InfoUSA has already gobbled up a few of the smaller players in the space, and Harte-Hanks bought PostFuture as well. Why is it good? Everyone wins. Clients win…
Email Deliverability Data
Email Deliverability Data We just published our 2004 year-end email deliverability report. Feel free to download the pdf, but I’ll summarize here. First, this report is very different from the reports you see published by Email Service Providers like Digital Impact and DoubleClick, because (a) it measures deliverability across a broad cross-section of mailers, not just a single ESP’s clients, and (b) it is a true measure of deliverability — what made it to the inbox — as opposed to the way some ESPs measure and report on deliverability, which is usually just the percentage of email that didn’t bounce or get outright blocked as spam. Headline number one: the “false positive” problem (non-spam ending up in the junk mailbox)…
Developer User Guide?
Developer User Guide? Tom Evslin wrote a two-part series this week called “Managing Programming for CEOs” (links here for Part I and Part II). The first is pretty funny, and the second has some good thoughts in it, especially around milestone creation. But if Tom’s had the experice he relays in Part I in real-life over and over, I have a suggestion for him: get a great head of development he can trust, and work closely with him or her over the years to build a relationship of mutual trust so those issues are no different than they are with functional managers of other departments. We are fortunate enough at Return Path to have two such individuals in Andy Sautins…
Why Email Lists Need to Be More Like Toothpaste
Why Email Lists Need to Be More Like Toothpaste My colleague Mike Mayor’s column this week in iMedia Connection is a great quick read for anyone connected to the email list business. Warning! Reading this article may cause you to ask some more probing questions before your next list management or list rental event…
10 Candles
10 Candles My colleague Mike Mayor and I were reminded that yesterday was the 10th anniversary of the founding of the web design firm that would eventually become NetCreations (a company Return Path acquired last year) by Rosalind Resnick and Ryan Scott. Also, today apparently Yahoo! turns 10 (and is giving away free ice cream to commemorate the event). In different ways, and obviously at different scales, both serve as proof that one of the Internet’s most enduring concepts is to simply allow consumers to tell you what it is they are looking for and then to give it them. Think of the hundreds of companies that did not make it to their 10th birthday partly (or even their 1st)…
Oh, Behave!
Oh, Behave! This week, we launched behavioral targeting for email through our PostMasterDirect group. This is a great development for us and will produce great value for clients over time by increasing response rates. It may seem like a bit of buzzword bingo since BT is the phrase of the year in the online media world, but it’s actually a product we’ve had in development for some time now. Our VP Engineering for list and data products, Whitney McNamara, had a great posting on his blog about BT and how we do it. The whole thing is worth a read, but the real gem in my mind (and what’s most consistent with Return Path‘s philosophy about consumers and targeting in…
Spam, Hot Spam, Now Only $0.10 Each!
Spam, Hot Spam, Now Only $0.10 Each! By now, you may have seen news of the report from Ferris research citing the annual global economic impact of spam at $50 billion (apparently the U.S.’s share, $17 billion, is 0.17% of our gross national income). I have no doubt that spam is an expensive problem. IT managers and sysadmins spend lots of time dealing with it, and much hardware, software, and bandwidth are consumed. But the one number that strikes me as odd in the report is that the economic impact of not having a spam filter (i.e., manually filtering spam, more commonly known as hitting the delete key) is $718 per user per year. I guess it depends how you…
Everyone’s a Direct Marketer, Part III
Everyone’s a Direct Marketer, Part III With every company as a direct marketer, and with (hopefully!) every company embracing some of the best DM principles, what does this shift mean for the way companies will be structured in the future? First, let’s talk about the internal structure of a company. The biggest shift going on here is that customers are becoming a more important part of all employees’ daily lives, not just those in the advertising department. I wrote an earlier posting called Everyone’s a Marketer which applies here. Most likely, more and more members of your organization are touching customers every day — and they need to be trained how to think like marketers. But beyond that, companies will…
Now, This is What Blogs Are All About
Now, This is What Blogs Are All About In case you missed it, this article from Peggy Noonan in today’s Wall Street Journal is a great follow-up to my rant yesterday about how blogging isn’t going to eviscerate commercial email. This is what blogging is all about, not replacing marketing tools and techniques.