Brilliant Client Service:  It’s Not Just for Peaceful Revolutionaries Any More!

I just read this quote, attributed to an unlikely source, Mahatma Gandhi, in an annual report from InfoUSA, one of the biggest public companies in our industry:

A customer is the most important visitor on our premises.
He is not dependent on us.  We are dependent on him.
He is not an interruption in our work.  He is the purpose of it.
He is not an outsider in our business. He is part of it.
We are not doing him a favor by serving him. He is doing us a favor by giving us an opportunity to do so.

This quote is widely believed to actually be from Gandhi, despite questions about that authenticity, at least according to one expert.

But boy is the content spot on.  We literally just finished developing something we call the Return Path Client Promise a few weeks ago, which you can see here.  The trick to getting something like this to work is that it has to be truly genuine and come from within, not from on high.  Our marketing, sales, and account teams worked diligently over the course of a couple of months to draft and refine this document and make it accurate and meaningful.

Association Proliferation

NOTE:  I was fortunate enough to be asked to write a monthly column for DMNews.  This is the most recent column.  By agreement with DMNews, I am linking to them for the bulk of the content, but you can get an idea of what I’m talking about with the first few sentences below.

You can be forgiven if you can’t precisely remember the difference between the OPA and the IAB. Or the DMA and the DAC. Or EEC and ESPC. Or WOMMA and OMMA. And, while we are at it, what exactly is a MAAWG? And isn’t OLGA the name of someone you’d go out to dinner with?

Gone are the days when a business could belong to one or maybe two trade associations and feel that it was covering…(read the rest at DMNews here).

Only Once, Part II

As many of you know, this blog is called Only Once because You’re Only a First-Time CEO Once — that’s the general theme of my writings on entrepreneurship and on the email marketing industry (read the initial posting which explains all of that here).

As of today, I am entering into another Only Once because "You’re Only a First-Time Parent Once" as well!  Mariquita and I welcomed Casey Joanna Blumberg into the world at 8:46 this evening.  Everyone is doing well, and you can see our official announcement here. 

• Fractals of Change: Are You an Entrepreneur?
  Tom Evslin’s entertaining Top 10 Ways You Know You’re an Entrepreneur. Some may dovetail nicely if I ever write up my read of The Fountainhead through entrepreneurial lens!
  (tags: Entrepreneur VC)

Feeling Less Like a Luddite:  Welcome, Meebo!

As I’ve written about on occasion (here, here), it’s easy to feel like a Luddite with the rapid pace of change of the web these days.  Anyway, I’m feeling slightly less like one today with the addition of Meebo to my blog.

I read about Meebo in David Kirkpatrick’s Fast Forward column last week, and it was such a cool idea, I had to install it right away.  Basically, it adds a widget to the right sidebar of my blog which allows readers to Instant Message me any time I’m online if they’re reading my blog (anonymously, I think, and regardless of whether or not they have a Meebo account, although I needed to create one in order to install it on OnlyOnce).

Having a Meebo account is also basically like having a web-based version of Trillian, so I can get on IM from any computer with a browser at any time.

Should be an interesting way to hear more from readers.  We’ll see.  Meebo Me!

The Business of Being a Scumbag

I’ve written a couple of times about what Fred calls the Internet’s Axis of Evil.  But David Kirkpatrick from Fortune just blew me away yesterday with his lurid description of the Internet’s crime scene.  This is a must-read for anyone who works in the online medium.

Unleashing the True Power of Email

A recent Behavioral Insider column had a truly tantalizing quote from iPost’s Steve Webster:

"There is the presumption that when someone receives an email message they then click on the email go to the Web site and either make a purchase or not and then they are done interacting with your email. This turned out to be wrong. We discovered very quickly that the power of an email impression lasts for weeks after the customer has actually received the message. The particular interaction they will have with you later really depends more on their personal preferences than on your putting a new email in front of them."

The highlighted portion is a point we’ve been making here at Return Path for years now.  Emails are not perceived by recipients as distinct, one-off promotions.  But many marketers continue to view them that way and make both strategic and tactical errors because of that.  Here are a five things you need to start doing – right now – if you want to capitalize on the true power of email:

1. Stop analyzing each email in a vacuum.  The whole is worth more than the sum of the parts.  The deeper you can dive into your data and analyze the whole program and how recipients interact (or don’t) the better decisions you can make.  Be sure to read the entire Behavioral Insider column – some of the tests they describe around segmentation reveal how email does or doesn’t influence purchasing and how it can be used more effectively.

2. Sending ever more email isn’t the answer.  To the point above, more email seldom makes buyers buy more.  Marketers don’t quite believe this because every email blast they deploy results in revenue.  But the point this column makes is that you have to look at what is happening at the individual level.  It soon becomes clear that sending targeted, segmented email – less email per person – is more effective.

3. Look past the click. As a corollary to #1, many marketers believe if a subscriber doesn’t click, they haven’t interacted.  This clearly isn’t the case.  The smartest marketers segment their non-clickers into buckets.  For example, a retailer might look at non-clickers who are openers, online purchasers, site browsers or in-store purchasers.  If you have an email recipient who browses your website every other week and then purchases in store once per quarter, it is nutty to assume that the email isn’t influencing that just because they don’t click through.

4. Reliance on CPA is going to bite you.  Yesterday my colleague Craig Swerdloff wrote about CPA versus CPM in list rental on the Return Path corporate blog.  Marketers believe that CPA is the best deal for them because they only pay for performance.  The problem is that CPA often requires a very high degree of volume to achieve success for both publisher and marketer.  All those extra emails don’t just self-destruct and wipe the memory of the recipient who doesn’t take your "action."  They’ve still made an impression – positive or negative.  Both CPA and CPM can be effective, but you need to work with an expert who understands that email is about more than clicks.

5. Permission + value = ROI. Steve Webster’s quote goes on to point out that "We thought the quality of the … creative made all the difference. It turns out that it does – but not nearly as much as the fact that [the email] made an impression on a customer who actually was interested in receiving an email from you."  Sending email without permission, as defined by the customer not by you, is a non-starter.  The first step is getting that person to proactively sign up, and then making sure they recognize your emails as desired.  Then the value piece kicks in.  Do you send what you promised?  Do your emails exceed their expectations?  Do you delight them?  The more yeses you rack up there, the more revenue your email will generate.

Six Candles:  You Can’t Tell What The Living Room Looks Like From the Front Porch

Today, Return Path is six years old.  I thought I’d celebrate the occasion by reflecting back on how different our business is now than we thought it would be at the beginning.

When we started Return Path, we were sure Email Change of Address (ECOA) was going to be a $100mm business.  It still may be someday, but it’s not now.  If you had told me when we started the company that we’d execute on ECOA but also be market leaders in email delivery assurance (which didn’t exist at the time), email list management and list rental (a huge market by the time we started), and email-based market research (which only barely existed at the time), I would have said "no way!"

But that’s where we are today, and we’re quite proud of it.  There aren’t more than a dozen people left in the company from the original, original team that set out to build a new type of product called Email Change of Address back in 1999/2000, although lots of our alumni are out there and remember the early days.

Running a startup is all about flexibility.  Unless you are that 1 in 100 entrepreneur whose original idea turns out to be exactly the wonderful, high-growth, high-margin business that you thought it was going to be on the back of that cocktail napkin, you need to be nimble and be able to shift as you spot new opportunities.  I’m happy that our team and culture thrive on that level of flexibility.

As one of my previous managers once said, you can’t tell what the living room looks like from the front porch.  You have to walk up to the front door, unlock it, and go inside and wander around before you get a real read on it, not to mention figure out if you want to have a seat.

Happy Birthday, Return Path!

Academic Inspiration

I just read in my alumni magazine that at Opening Exercises for incoming freshmen this year, Princeton President Shirley Tilghman closed her remarks with the following:

For the next four years, you will be encouraged – and indeed sometimes even exhorted – to develop the qualities of mind that allowed Katherine Newman, Simon Morrison, and Alan Krueger to change what we know about the world.  Those qualities are the willingness to ask an unorthodox question and pursue its solution relentlessly; to cultivate the suppleness of mind to see what lies between black and white; to reject knee-jerk reactions to ideas and ideologies; to recognize nuance and complexity in an argument; to differentiate between knowledge and belief; to be prepared to be surprised; and to appreciate that changing your mind is not a sign of weakness but of strength.  We ask you to be open to new ideas, however surprising; to shun the superficial trends of popular culture in favor of careful analysis; and to recognize propaganda, ignorance, and baseless revisionism when you see it.  That is the essence of a Princeton education.

While some of these comments are more appropriate for an academic setting, how many of us who run businesses want to encourage the same behavior and thoughtfulness of our employees?  Here are a few examples taken from the above.

To change what we know about the world — a hallmark of a successful startup is to invent new products and services, to change the way the world works in some small way.  In our case, to fix some of the most critical problems with email marketing.

The willingness to ask an unorthodox question and pursue its solution relentlessly — reinventing some part of the world only comes by challenging the status quo.  Return Path was started by asking an unorthodox question:  why isn’t there an easy way for people to change their email address online?

To cultivate the suppleness of mind to see what lies between black and white; to recognize nuance and complexity in an argument — the longer I run a company, the less black and white I see.  When I do seev it, I think of it as a gift.  The rest of the day is spent trying to figure out the zone in between.  Making 51/49 decisions all day long is difficult, but it’s easier when the rest of the organization is capable of doing the same thing.

To appreciate that changing your mind is not a sign of weakness but of strength; to be open to new ideas, however surprising — perseverance in business is critical; stubbornness is deadly.  How does the old saying go?  The definition of Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results.  If the only thing we were still doing at Return Path is ECOA, we’d be long gone by now, or at least MUCH smaller than we are today.

I don’t know too many entrepreneurs that don’t espouse most of the above principles.  The trick is to build an entire company of people that do.

• Soup for Nuts
  From our client, Business & Legal Reports, a HILARIOUS read in the strange-but-true category. This is essential reading for any manager who has ever mediated an employee dispute. Tthanks to Tami Forman for citing this one!
  (tags: Humor)

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 by my blog, I am responsible for driving traffic that buys about $2,500 worth of merchandise from Amazon every quarter, which yields about $100 to me in affiliate fees.  All I really link to are business books that I summarize in postings, although people who click from my blog to Amazon end up buying all sorts of random things (according to my report, last quarter’s purchases included a Kathy Smith workout DVD and a new socket wrench set in addition to lots of copies of Jim Collins’ Built to Last and Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink.

This is a true win-win-win — Amazon gets traffic for a mere 4% of sales, a relatively low marketing cost; I get a small amount of money to cover the various fees associated with my blog (Typepad, Newsgator, Feedburner), and people who read my blog pay what they’re going to pay to Amazon anyway – and maybe get something they otherwise wouldn’t have gone out to get in the process.

My blog is certainly not a top 1,000 blog, or probably not even a top 10,000 blog in terms of size of audience.  This is merely a microcosm that proves the macro trends.  If I’m driving $10,000 per year of business to Amazon, now I REALLY understand how there are now approximately 500,000 people who make their LIVING by selling goods on eBay, and how probably another 500,000 people are making good side money or possibly even making their living by running offers and affiliate marketing programs from their web sites.  I’m like a little ball bearing in the finely tuned but explosively growing wheel of e-commerce.

If my quarterly affiliate fees keep growing, I’ll find something more productive or charitable to do with them than keep them for myself.  But for now, I am covering my costs and marveling on a personal level at how all this stuff works as well as it does.