Jun
19
By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman
A few years ago we announced our support of a charity called the Accelerated Cure Project for Multiple Sclerosis (see the post about it here and learn more about Accelerated Cure here). While we have a strong culture of giving back to the community at Return Path and do that in several ways, we chose this charity as the main beneficiary of our corporate philanthropy efforts for three reasons:
Categories: News
May
06
By Anita Absey
SVP, Sales & Marketing
Last week I wrote about Return Path's Email Expert Seminar heading to Denver, Colorado. Well, in that same week we are also making a stop in Dallas, Texas.
The agenda for both seminars has been created to be super-informative and ultra-interactive. First, you will hear from our own email experts - Stephanie Miller, George Bilbrey and Bonnie Malone Fry - as they give you the lowdown on email reputation, subscriber experience and acquisition strategies. We then move into roundtables where you'll get to ask our experts the questions that keep you up at night. Our experts, along with your colleagues at the table, will help you think through new tactics to achieve your email marketing goals.
We've also lined up two great speakers in Dallas. ...
Categories: News
Mar
18
By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman
Our four-year old oft maligned anti-spam legislation in this country, the CAN-SPAM act, has seen an uptick of activity this past week.
Melinda Krueger sums up the sentiments of many in the anti-spam community in her Email Insider column today when she says,
"There is no provision in the act against sending unsolicited email as long as you comply with the rest of the act. The motivation of the act was more to make voters feel politicians were doing something about this annoying problem."
In the last two days, however, we got news of ValueClick's $2.9 million settlement with the FTC over a CAN-SPAM violation (the largest ever), as well as notorious hardcore spammer Robert Soloway pleading guilty on a variety of charges for Really Bad Things, probably including spamming (I've read differing reports of his plea, some of which include the CAN-SPAM violation, and some of which don't).
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Feb
12
By Anita Absey
SVP Sales & Marketing
We're painting the town red at the some of the trendiest conferences around. Will you be there too? If so, come talk shop with us. We love to talk about email. Sit in on one of our expert sessions, schedule a meeting while you are in town or just come and say 'hi". No "B" list here. Everyone is an "A" in our book. Check out where we'll be.
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Jan
14
By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman
For 8 or 9 years now, we haven't received a single bill by U.S. mail. We use PayTrust (originally PayMyBills.com) for "online" bill pay. We have a P.O. Box somewhere in South Dakota that we've redirected all our bills to. The bills get opened, scanned, we get an email, we enter in a payment amount and date. No fuss, no muss. PayTrust even figures out which bills can be electronically delivered and provides an easy interface to set that up directly into the PayTrust account as well. I haven't received a bill or written a check in years.
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Jan
10
By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman
In my last post, we discussed Return Path's role in keeping the world safe for email marketing and I ended with a very important question - how can we help consumers trust email more?
To foster reliability and trustworthiness we have to first improve email's credibility from an operational and strategic perspective. When you send email, it has to get there. And when it gets there it has to be relevant. That is how you build trust and loyalty; by delivering what a person wants on time and as expected. Whether you are a marketer who uses email to build revenue and relationships or a consumer who uses email to make connections to people, places or things, you are entitled to get what you asked for, and perhaps paid for.
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Jan
08
By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman
Since we put up our new web site with the above as its new tag line a couple months ago, a bunch of people have asked me what the heck it means. Some have even snickered when doing so. Why do we want a world that's safe for email marketing? Doesn't that mean just promulgating the spam problem?
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Jan
02
By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman
While everyone is taking the end of year opportunity to make their resolutions and predictions for 2008, I thought, hey, predictions are tough to do. Much easier to spell out 10 things that I am pretty sure AREN'T going to happen in the next 365 days instead. So here we go...
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Dec
20
By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman
Every year, I get a daily flood of business holiday cards on my desk in the second half of December. Some are nice and have notes from people with whom we do business - clients, vendors, partners, and the like. Some are kind of random, and it takes me a while to even figure out who they are from. Occasionally some even come in with no mark identifying from whence they came other than an illegible signature.
And every year, I receive one or two email cards instead of print & post cards, some apologetic about the medium. Until this year.
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Nov
07
By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman
Keeping the World Safe for Email Marketing
What the heck does that mean, exactly? Well, it's what we're dedicated to at Return Path. Whatever we do - from improving mailer reputations, to making sure the right emails get delivered, to email lead generation, to strategic consulting - it's all about helping our clients to profit from producing amazing, safe, and secure email experiences for their customers and prospects.
To be successful at that we need to make sure that clients and prospects understand what we do and how we can help them be most successful in the world of email. So, we have overhauled our site to make it a more engaging and informative, not to mention easier to navigate, place.
So, what's new? Glad you asked...
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Oct
11
By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman
Last year on my personal blog, OnlyOnce, I wrote about the diminishing distinction between B2B marketing and B2C marketing, and how getting the right message to the right person at the right time blurs those traditional boundaries. I have a different thought on the same theme today, spurred on by Elly Trickett, who is DMNews' fantastic new Editor-in-Chief. Elly wrote a great editorial in the October 1 print edition of the publication that I just caught today entitled "Don't Forget Your Consumer Side," in which she recounted a speech she made to an audience of marketers where she asked them to come up with examples of trigger-based digital marketing they had received, and one member of the audience replied with the statement, "We're not consumers."
Hogwash!
That's just the kind of comment that gives the marketing and advertising industry a bad name, not to mention leading directly to bad practices. ...
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Sep
27
By Anita Absey
SVP Sales & Marketing
We are big fans of the DMA Annual Conference. It always provides the perfect environment to meet with clients and partners - and to meet new ones. We hope to see you this year.
We will be at booth #1541 and will be turning our space into a cozy Return Path Cafe. Take a break from the hustle of the show and stop by for a free steaming latte! We would love to hear what's on your mind and answer your most pressing questions about email and online practices influencing your bottom line.
Want a more personalized consultation in Chicago? We will be providing customized mini-sessions for select clients and prospects on improving email deliverability, building customer bases and increasing response rates. These sessions
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Sep
20
By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman
Last month I was pleased to announce that we'd made the Inc. 500 list for the second year in a row. Well, I have another repeat win to report - Return Path has, for the third year in a row, been named to Deloitte's list of the top 50 fastest-growing technology companies in New York.
Last year we attributed our Deloitte honor to three key ingredients: passionate employees, solid investors and great customers. And success breeds success. In the past year we've added a whole new crop of passionate employees (150 and counting!) and even more great customers (over 1,000 across our business lines). ...
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Aug
27
By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman
Last year I was pleased and proud to write about our debut on the Inc. 500 list of America's fastest growing companies. At that time I wrote that "Now our challenge, of course, is STAYING on the list, and hopefully upping our ranking next year!" Well, I am again please and proud to announce that we, in fact, stayed on the list. (You can read all the Inc. coverage here and see our press release about the ranking here.)
Unfortunately, we didn't make the second part of our goal to up our rank. But, we did up our growth - our three-year revenue growth rate was 18% higher than last year. ...
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Aug
09
By Anita Absey
SVP Sales & Marketing
I am so pleased to announce that our very own Matt Blumberg has been awarded the Direct Marketing Club of New York's Mal Dunn Leadership Award. This award was created to recognize outstanding contributions to the direct marketing industry. Past recipients include Lester Wunderman, John Caples, Jonah Gitlitz, Robert Wientzen and Ed Burnett.
We are excited about this award for two reasons. First, we obviously think Matt is pretty smart guy and that the contributions he's made to email have had a huge impact on the direct marketing industry. But perhaps more importantly, we believe that the DMCNY's recognition of those contributions signals a change in how interactive marketing is viewed by traditional direct marketers. This trend actually began last year when ...
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Jul
09
By Stephanie Miller
VP of Strategic Services
As part of a larger announcement on a number of email initiatives, the DMA announced today that it is acquiring the Email Experience Council (EEC). The Email Marketing Council of the DMA (of which I have served as Vice Chair for two years) will merge with the EEC under the banner of the Email Experience Council.
As someone active in leadership roles for both groups, I see the strong synergy between the mission and activities. I'm delighted for all involved - and especially for the industry. Merging the groups will help focus the work of so many talented and dedicated email marketers, and we'll all enjoy the power and support of the DMA behind us.
I'm not Pollyanna about this at all - we have a lot of work to do to make the combined group a bulwark for the industry. But we will be doing so from a dual foundation that is solid and has really strong leadership at the helm and at the committee level.
Here are my predictions ...
Categories: News
Jul
01
By Stephanie Miller
VP of Strategic Services
Increasingly, marketers find themselves incorporating a wide array of marketing techniques into a cohesive, successful plan. Whether it is figuring out how to leverage email and search investments or doing a multi-channel outreach across online and offline advertising platforms, we are all in need of new ideas and methods. That is one of the reasons that Return Path is supporting the regional Online Marketing Summit series...
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Jun
27
By: Anita Absey
VP Sales & Marketing
I woke up today with a new way to look at the email industry, Return Path, and my role in both of them. No longer am I just focused on sales and client development - today, I add marketing to the mix. As Matt wrote yesterday, with Jennifer Wilson's departure I become the SVP of sales and marketing, and I am more than ready to embrace the new challenges and opportunities that role brings.
I'll be looking for ways to synergize our sales and marketing efforts - making both of them more effective. I'll also be on a mission to expand my view of the email world under the marketing lens. I'm sure there will be lots of "ah-ha" moments as I discover what I know, what I don't know, and all the things in between.
For my peers out there for whom this is old hat - tell me what to avoid, and maybe share a few gems. Tell me ...
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Jun
27
By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman
For those of you who have known Return Path for a long time, you know that Jennifer Wilson has been here running the show for our marketing (and various other things on and off) since we acquired Veripost back in 2001 -- and for Veripost for a year before that. Jennifer is leaving the company next week as she prepares for her second baby and a full-time career as a mom.
It's often said that the five stages of emotional response to a loss are: (1) denial, (2) bargaining, (3) anger, (4) despair, (5) acceptance. I never really hit "anger" when Jennifer decided to switch careers, but I sure cycled through the other four (just ask her about the bargaining sometime for a good laugh). Jennifer has been an incredibly valuable part of our team here and will be sorely missed. ...
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Jun
05
By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman
Andy Sernovitz's very cleverly-named Damn, I Wish I'd Thought of That is back, this time in blog and RSS feed format as well as, of course, email newsletter format. Andy is a Return Path alum and does a great job of crystallizing smart and clever ideas for marketers into manageable nuggets, particularly around viral and word-of-mouth marketing (Andy wrote a great book on WOM marketing, which I reviewed on my personal blog).
He was nice enough to interview me for his blog. As a teaser, Andy asked me (and a bunch of other people) three questions ...
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May
09
By The Return Path Habitat for Humanity Team
As part of its commitment to community service, Return Path has sponsored two teams of people to go to New Orleans to assist Habitat for Humanity in the post-Katrina and Rita clean up and rebuilding effort. Our colleague Tom Bartel wrote about the experience in helping with the clean up team last year. And just last week six of us (Russ Bird, Dan Deneweth, Lisa Filipek, Ezra Fischer, Stephanie Miller and Melinda Plemel) headed down to the Crescent City and found there is still very much to be done more than 15 months after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Here's a quick glimpse at our efforts, to give you an idea of the daily struggles still faced in the New Orleans area. ...
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Apr
26
By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman
Some news floated around the email marketing world yesterday that is potentially disturbing and destructive but highlights some lunacy at the same time. I hope I'm getting enough of the details right here (and quite frankly that isn't a joke, which it feels like).
Tom DiStefano of Boca-based PerfectWeb Technologies is suing direct marketing behemoth InfoUSA for patent infringement of a business process patent for bulk email distribution that he received in 2003.
I will first issue my disclaimers that I'm not a patent lawyer (nor do I even play one on TV) and that I have only quickly read both the legal complaint and the patent. But my general take on this is that it's more silly than anything else -- but has the potential to be destructive at the same time. ...
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Feb
15
By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman
I was trying to explain the current state of Return Path's Postmaster Network online advertising business (email lists, lead gen, RSS) to someone from outside the industry the other day, when it occurred to me that many online marketing vehicles are still split between running on the offline paradigm and running on the online paradigm. I don't have a lot of detailed stats on all of this at my fingertips, but bear with my observations.
To me, the offline paradigm has always been characterized by big agency buys, driven by thematic/brand oriented creative campaigns that cost a fortune to develop. This is even true to a large extent for direct marketing, although the mechanics are different. It's relied on lots of third party intermediaries to connect the audience (or more specifically, estimates of the audience) to the marketer. It has paid all of these people on a percentage of the media spend, which is so massive that a 10% override on it can keep you in business and be dissociated from effort expended or value created. Many of the original forms of online media -- banners, lists -- still operate partially in this world. This part of the online ad market is growing, but more slowly than others.
Contrast this with the online paradigm ...
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Feb
08
By Craig Swerdloff
VP and GM of Customer Acquisition Solutions
Joe Marchese, author of Online Spin, recently wrote "Advertising is changing from the buying and selling of people's attention with only implied consent, to a system requiring explicit consent of the people."
I would argue that consent for advertising was never implied. Rather it was assumed that consumers of content understood the value of such content and would tolerate advertising in exchange for it remaining free. In today's world there is a growing abundance of free, original content and consumers are less willing to participate in the exchange. A great example of this is YouTube, which has yet to figure out how to package pre-roll advertising around video content without causing a mass exodus of consumers. Another example is TiVo, which has television viewers blasting past the ads to get to the content.
Explicit consent is the future of all advertising. ...
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Jan
30
By Tami Monahan Forman
Director, Customer Marketing
Our friends at Blue Sky Factory have a relatively new podcast called ROI Radio. In the most recent episode they interviewed our own Matt Blumberg, which he reports was a lot of fun. The 30-minute chat focuses on Return Path, where things are headed for us and even about the growth and development of RSS and feed technology and FeedBurner. It's a fun listen during a lunch break.
Of course, you can also subscribe to it through iTunes or sign up for their blog feed and have the newest episodes delivered straight to you. If you are involved in online media in any way, it's definitely worth a listen.
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Jan
30
By Tami Monahan Forman
Director, Customer Marketing
We want to provide you the most valuable email marketing blog possible, and we could use your help to do so. Help us give you more of what you want -- and less of what you don't -- by taking our survey and telling us what you think about the content, frequency and topics in our blog. It will only take about seven minutes to complete, and you may even win a $50 Amazon gift card for your time.
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Jan
29
By Tom Bartel
Chief Privacy Officer
For anyone marketing in the United Kingdom the New Year has started with a new email regulation to decipher and comply with: the UK Companies Act Amendments of 2006.
As in the US, where the CAN-SPAM act requires postal address in the footer of each commercial message, the new UK amendment imposes similar requirements for transactional types of business email.
The law extends company registration requirements already in place for paper business letters and forms -- requiring certain company details to appear in email versions of those business letters and order forms. ...
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Jan
10
By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman
Over the last few weeks or so we've been enjoying (and participating in) the conversations going on in the industry predicting trends for 2007. In fact, we encourage you to check out the musings of the folks at eROI, Dave Pasternak and Dianna Dilworth at DMNews, and Jordan Ayan at SubscriberMail.
Here's our pick for top 5 trends to watch in 2007.
More spam is on its way: The huge increase in the amount of spam being sent has had some serious implications for ISPs and other receivers as they grapple with the increased traffic on their networks. ...
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Dec
26
By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman
I recently started writing a column for DMNews. It's exciting for Return Path and for email marketing in general - it really shows that we have a seat at the table with one of the industry's most venerable trade pubs.
This is why I urge you to read this month's edition. In it I discuss ...
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Dec
15
By Stephanie Miller
VP, Strategic Services
Get a bunch of smart email marketers together and inevitably we start celebrating email as the mother of all online marketing channels. Email was certainly the center of attention at the Email Insiders Summit last week, but what really struck me in my conversations there (and since) is how being at the center doesn't mean email is in a vacuum.
As the Program Chair of the event, I was able to speak at length with our keynote speakers and many of the panelists. We all talked openly about how in some ways email has let us down. It's not the interactive customer dialog medium we hoped for, and it's harder than ever to break through the clutter. Even getting delivered to the inbox is more complicated.
Yet, email marketers really embrace that email is most successful when it's more than just a message blast. ...
Categories: News
Dec
12
By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman
Here we go again: another obituary for email marketing.
This time it comes from, of all people, speakers at the Email Insider Summit. According to a MediaPost article, several executives feel that email marketing is on the decline, mainly because of the spam issue. Consumers and businesspeople are fed up with so much spam and marketers can't get to their inboxes anyway. Woe is email.
I'm sure this won't surprise you, but I beg to differ.
To insinuate that consumers and business executives are no longer interested in receiving offers for relevant services and products simply isn't consistent with actual data. ...
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Dec
06
By Jack Sinclair
COO
It seems a little immodest to wish ourselves a Happy Birthday, but we feel compelled to celebrate the fact that today is the 7th anniversary of the founding of Return Path. As someone who has been here since Day Two, I've had a front row seat for the whole wild ride. It hasn't been dull!
And boy does Year 8 look exciting! New products, new services, new marketing programs ... we've got lots of irons in the fire and we are poised to execute across a wider market than we ever imagined. Of course none of this -- past, present or future -- would be possible without the combined support of our clients, employees and investors.
So, what's our biggest challenge? ...
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Nov
20
By Stephanie Miller
VP of Strategic Services
Got an email file you wish was more responsive and growing faster? Looking for proven methods to determine the value of an email address to your company?
Please take this 10-minute online survey and participate with other email marketers to help all of us better understand key drivers of email list growth and file valuation.
I'm the co-chair of the List Growth & Engagement Roundtable of the Email Experience Council. ...
Categories: News
Nov
10
By Stephanie Miller
VP, Strategic Services
The news last week that Yesmail was fined a little over $50,000 for violating the CAN-SPAM opt-out provision reminded us that all too often, it's too hard to unsubscribe from promotional email programs. Certainly the letter of the law is important, but it's the spirit of making your unsubscribe process easy to find and follow that protects your brand, improves customer satisfaction and reduces ISP complaints which can lead to low deliverability.
When is the last time you actually tested your unsubscribe process? I heard from three clients this week some variation of, "I think Steve in IT checks that..." Like all programming code, unsubscribe processes can break, and apparently the FTC really is watching.
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Nov
07
By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman
Back in 1999, there was no way to easily stay connected if you changed ISPs. No post office for email. So we created one - Return Path ECOA. More than 31 million consumers have used our ECOA service to stay in touch after an email address change - and we've been able to connect them with more than 300 companies and countless personal contacts using our services.
Now, the ECOA process that we designed has been granted patent 7,080,122 by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. ECOA matters now more than ever, not only helping companies keep in touch with customers, but also playing a role in email deliverability
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Nov
02
By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman
In case you missed it, the Direct Marketing Association's outstanding research department recently released some interesting reports (link so you can see the details of reports available to purchase). In particular, two stats jumped out at me:
This jives with something we heard a few years ago from one of our clients ...
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Nov
01
By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman
We are proud to be nominated for this year's ClickZ Marketing Excellence Awards in two categories: Email Innovation of the Year, for Sender Score Reputation Monitor, and Best Deliverability Service for Sender Score, overall. We are particularly excited about the recognition of our Sender Score Reputation Monitor innovation which was many years in the making and a real first-of-its-kind for mailers. By scoring all email senders' reputations we make it possible for marketers to "see" their program the way that ISPs and other receivers do. This gives marketers a much easier way to evaluate the health of their email program.
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Oct
10
By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman
As many readers of this blog know, Return Path wrote a book last year titled Sign Me Up! Our intention was to help marketers at all levels think through how they could best use email to build their businesses and increase revenue and give them a bunch of practical tips they could implement across a number of critical elements of their email programs.
This year, our publisher iUniverse gave us an opportunity to update the book and give us some additional marketing support, which will hopefully culminate in placement of the book in your nearest Barnes & Noble location. iUniverse is actually publishing the book, as opposed to us self-publishing, which means our content has passed some sort of editorial muster. New York Times bestseller list, look out!
The best part of publishing a revised edition is that we took the opportunity to add in some great new and more current information that can benefit all email marketers. ...
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Sep
18
By Rob Mattes
Chief Financial Officer
We just received some more great news – Return Path ranked #4 on Deloitte's New York Technology Fast 50 list! The list is based upon revenue growth over the past 5 years. This is another strong achievement for us to be proud of, on the heels of being selected #167 in the Inc 500 list, and a solid follow up to our #3 ranking on Deloitte’s list last year.
During the award presentation last week, Deloitte played a video of CEOs from the top 10 companies responding to various questions about their companies. Matt did a great job representing Return Path and clearly articulating how we are fortunate to have the attributes needed to grow a company: passionate employees, solid investors and of course, great customers.
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Aug
23
By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman
Anyway, Return Path was very fortunate to be ranked #167 in this year's Inc. Magazine Inc. 500 list of the fastest growing private companies in America. See the list here and our press release here. We were also happy to see clients of ours like Constant Contact and Zappos on the list, as well as fellow email companies Exact Target, Vertical Response, and research panel Epocrates. That's all the sign of a healthy industry! ...
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Aug
07
By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman
This must be what a professional sports team feels like when it finds itself with three picks in the first round of the draft. By adding stars to an already-solid franchise, you can do more, do it faster, and do it better than you were already doing things. Today, Return Path announces the hiring of three email gurus. Each brings a different skill set to the team, each is vitally important to our scalability and success, and each is a well-respected industry leader.
Heather Palmer Goff is moving to Colorado to join us as our VP of Client Management and Deliverability Consulting. Heather, of Responsys fame, will be managing our Sender Score program ....
Categories: News
Jun
29
By Ed Taussig
Director of Software Development
There has been some media hype lately about contextual - and often competitive - ads displaying in the web interfaces surrounding your email messages, particularly in Gmail. As marketers ponder whether to send email to Gmail customers at all, we decided to take a look at our Postmaster Network response rates to see if we could spot any issues lending credence to the hype.
The result: don't even think about taking Gmail customers off your list. People using Gmail responded BETTER than those using other ISPs. In fact, response rates were ...
Categories: News
Jun
13
By Dan Deneweth
Director of Product Management, Delivery Assurance Solutions
Since the merger of SBC and AT&T late last year, SBC has been busy making changes to their email infrastructure. Previously a member of the Yahoo's email network, SBC has been transitioning email accounts to the AT&T infrastructure.
It's not clear how long this transition will take to complete, but we are already seeing significant changes in how email into some SBC accounts is being handled. For example, delivery of email campaigns is now subject to AT&T rules rather than Yahoo's. Previously, if a campaign was bulked at Yahoo, it would also be bulked at SBC. This is no longer the case for accounts that have been transitioned to the new infrastructure. You could now see campaigns being bulked at Yahoo and not SBC (or vice versa).
Overall, we have not noticed any significant impacts on deliverability to SBC accounts. However, there are a few notable differences to keep in mind ....
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Jun
06
By: Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman
Today we announced our Sender Score Certifed Nonprofit program, making official the policy we've always held about accreditation: if nonprofits can qualify, they should enjoy the same benefits as commercial mailers. Even if they can't afford to "pay to play".
Though nominal, the fees associated with Sender Score Certified have kept many nonprofit organizations from seeking acceptance -- despite the fact that there have never been licensing fees for nonprofits, even when the program first launched as Bonded Sender years ago. The perceived hassles of application time and effort are also now non-issues, since we shortened the application process for everyone when re-launching Bonded Sender ....
Categories: News
May
10
By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman
Email marketing can seem like one big chicken-and-egg syndrome. Which comes first - the money to execute a quality program, or the results needed to earn those internal dollars? Read my column in Email Insider today for some ideas on how to improve results cost effectively, giving you the ammunition you need to fight for the bigger email budget you need to drive significant change.
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May
09
By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman
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, etc.)-- 23.5%
To Hotmail/MSN -- 19.5%
To Gmail -- 2.7%
Thanks to my colleague Iffat Ahmed for help pulling these numbers together.
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May
02
By Tom Bartel
Chief Privacy Officer
The Return Path culture has always focused on teamwork, and we've always stressed giving back to the community. As a corporation we support Accelerated Cure, a non-profit focused on finding a cure for Multiple Sclerosis. We also give employees time to support their own philanthropic passions. When Hurricane Katrina hit, we joined so many others who so badly wanted to help those affected by the storm. Instead of donating money, we donated time to Habitat for Humanity.
The first wave of volunteering was last week, and our team of six spent the week working together to gut houses in St. Bernard Parish. Being there reminded us that while our day-to-day mission is important, it is also important to give back to the community -- even when that community is the global one
Categories: News
Feb
05
Feb
01
By: Ken Magill
AOL's announcement that it would begin implementing Goodmail's CertifiedEmail program and phasing out its enhanced whitelist is being denounced by at least one top industry executive as a cynical attempt to get more money out of non-spamming marketers...
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Dec
08
By: George Bilbrey
GM of Delivery Assurance
I'm pleased to announce that Return Path's own Leslie Price is joining the Delivery Assurance Product Management team as the Senior Product Manager for Accreditation Services. Leslie brings a very strong understanding of the delivery issues faced by our clients, as well as, a strong set of relationships with the ISPs to the job. Leslie will be taking the lead as we start to improve and extend the Bonded Sender Program and continue to strengthen the services that we provide our clients.
With Leslie's depth of experience in this industry, she is the perfect person to lead the charge for us....
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Dec
01
By: Anita Absey
VP Sales and Account Development
We are delighted to have Dennis Malaspina join our Postmaster Direct team. His offline and interactive experience will be a tremendous asset to our customers, and will continue to help us expand the suite of online acquisition solutions we provide to the market.
Dennis will have the opportunity to continue to build our existing sales and client development team, and will have a strong voice in our ongoing database development and enhancement efforts.
His positive impact on the organization is already palpable...
Categories: News
Nov
29
By: Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman
At Return Path, we feel strongly that companies can and should make the world a better place in several different ways. Certainly, many companies' core businesses do that -- just look at all the breakthroughs in medicine and social services over the years brought to market by private enterprises. But many companies, including Return Path, aren't inherently "save the world" in nature (although some people in online marketing would have you believe that we are!), and those companies can still make a difference in the world in a few ways...
Tell me moreCategories: News
Nov
01
By: Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman
I'll admit up front, this is a little bit of an experiment. Our new website features this Online Resource Center for Email Marketers. It's a blog through which we will publish useful tidbits about email marketing, and occasionally about Return Path, for you and your team. You can comment on it, give us feedback or initiate a dialog. You can subscribe to it in the blue box to the side via RSS or email, and you can always subscribe to either of our stand-alone monthly email newsletters (content in the newsletters will also appear in the blog).
So what's the experiment? We're not exactly sure what a corporate blog is "supposed" to be -- we're inventing it as we go. The idea is to make our online presence more interesting, lively, interactive, useful, and transparent about Return Path. It is more about...
Tell me moreCategories: News
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