Monkey Mind Labs

Increasing the Attendance at Board Meetings

2009-08-10T19:15:31-06:00

Last week at Return Path we had one of our roughly quarterly in person board meetings in our Colorado office. For this meeting we extended the management participation to some key members of our team that don't frequently attend board meetings. They each had an important part of the agenda and (I thought) did a great job at leading their part of the conversation.

Each of these folks told me that the experience was really useful for them - they now see the business a little differently and from a broader perspective.

Seems like a win-win to me: the board gets a better feel for some of the key people in our business and these folks understand the business from a different perspective.

Return Path and Myspace

2009-08-03T11:59:00-06:00

This week is definitely an exciting week for mail. MySpace announced the introduction of MySpace Mail, a uniquely MySpace twist on mail that blends the best of social networking and traditional mail. Return Path has contended for some time that social networking is not a death knell for mail. In fact, we have always believed that people would want to have mail integrated into their social networking experience and have grown tired of siloed communications (i.e. mail via MySpace to people who aren't already MySpace friends). We applaud this move by MySpace as it's giving consumers what they want: Full-fledged mail integrated within their MySpace experience. MySpace, meanwhile, has created a mail system that has a lot of anti-spam technology built right in. And they are doing this, in part, with help from Return Path. The new @myspace.com mail service will be integrated with the Return Path Blacklist to keep out spam, phishing scams and other junk. They will also be implementing Return Path Certification to make sure that MySpace members get the email they request. They will also be contributing data in our Return Path Reputation Network, the cooperative database that powers our Sender Score. The introduction of mail at MySpace is likely to be good news for marketers. Today, consumer's attention is often split between many different communication platforms. MySpace users who embrace the new MySpace mail won't have their attention divided -- checking MySpace updates, dipping quickly into their outside email inbox. With mail integrated into MySpace, marketers may gain consumers attention. But marketers will need to move cautiously. While some people will appreciate an integrated mail experience - including transactional messages and even some promotions that are relevant - others may be very sensitive to marketing messages intruding on the social networking space. Of course, beyond the marketing impact, this new mail space is unlikely to be like anything we've seen before as MySpace has created a more meaningful, fun, and social experience around one of the most popular activities on MySpace. We have one early prediction: As MySpace integrates mail, we will see an even bigger explosion in word-of-mouth and viral marketing. Sure, email forward-to-a-friend has been around for years, but the MySpace and social network connections will make it easier and faster to share information with wider groups of people. Whatever they come up with, we are sure it will be very interesting, especially for consumers who have embraced social media with such passion.

Return Path: One of the Best Places to Work in Colorado

2009-08-03T08:31:00-06:00

One of Return Path's core values is that the employee comes first. It's a somewhat heretical notion. However, we've found that putting the employee first give our clients and excellent experience and drives financial results that our shareholders are happy about.

Therefore, it was very gratifying to be voted as one of the best places to work in Colorado. More details on the Return Path blog.

2009 Deliverability Benchmark Report: Don't Be a Statistic

2009-07-22T21:26:50-06:00

This week Return Path released a new Email Deliverability Benchmark Report. It's been a few years since we published this kind of data and the big news is that the news hasn't changed much in that time. On average, commercial email is still being blocked at a rate of about 20%. There are a number of reasons that deliverability is still a crisis for email marketers, and we outline those reasons in the report, which you can download here. But one reason I'd like to talk about here is that the changes that are required to improve deliverability are sometimes perceived as difficult for a company to implement. Not because they are, I would contend, but because internal complacency can be a roadblock to marshaling even the small amount of resources needed. And in today's economy that isn't totally surprising. It's hard to justify, for example, spending time and energy on fixing a sub-optimal unsubscribe process when activities that are perceived as having a bigger revenue impact are fighting for space at the top of the to-do list. But I would argue that the time, money and energy spent on improving deliverability IS a revenue-generating activity. Or, at the very least, it's a revenue-preserving activity, and in this economy is there really a difference? In our press release about this report we do some simple, back of the envelope math. Let's say you have 100,000 email addresses in your database. Now let's say that you generate $1 in revenue per email you send. If your inbox placement rate is 80% then you are losing $20,000 every single time you send an email. Even marketers with more modest lists can lose thousands of dollars when their email does not get to its destination. For bigger companies this cost can sky-rocket into the millions. The good news is that it does not have to be so. We have plenty of clients who achieve and maintain average inbox placement rates of 100%. They reap the rewards of high deliverability, but they also reap the rewards from having a great email program. That's the best news of all - the changes you may need to make to improve your inbox placement rates are usually changes that also lead to a better subscriber experience. This, in turn, leads to better response and more revenue. So my advice to email marketers reading this report is this: Don't be discouraged. Be inspired. You do not have to die by these numbers. They are, after all, an average. You can be better than average - way better than average, actually. I see it happen every single day.

Why Seedlist-based Monitoring Makes Sense

2009-05-23T07:08:35-06:00

We recently had a client at an Email Service Provider ask us - why do you need to use seed addresses to monitor your inbox placement? We can just monitor inbox placement with our 'regular' delivery reporting (based on SMTP logs). The short answer is that mail will be accepted for delivery but not be put into the inbox - it's placed in the junk mail folder or accepted for delivery and simply deleted (in my experience, that is less common).

So how frequently is that a problem? Pretty frequently it turn out. We took a look at all our clients' campaigns using our mailbox monitor tool for the last 30 days. We found that across all ISPs, about 55% of the time, a delivery problem meant having a message put in a junk mail or bulk mail folder. That number is larger at the some of largest mail providers:

So, that's why you need to monitor mail streams with seed lists.

Gmail To Prioritize Your Inbox for You?

2009-05-23T06:51:06-06:00

Interesting article about a potentially upcoming Gmail feature that prioritizes your inbox for you.

Learning to Pivot: Yogi Berra on Startups

2009-03-29T16:56:06-06:00

Redeye VC had a great post on how startups need to "pivot" - to rethink their initial business plan when things don't quite work out the way they had intended. The history of Return Path is the history of the pivot. Now that we're at our ~ third incarnation, I finally feel like we have products, positioning and team to really do something special.

Long live the pivot.

Death of Email Meme: Do the Kids Get Email?

2009-03-27T19:22:58-06:00

The death of email hypothesis goes something like this:

Younger generations use other methods to communicate than email. They text to communicate. They IM to communicate. They use social networks to communicate. The only time they use email is to talk to old folks.
When the younger generations make it into the workforce, email will be supplanted by other media.

I love the data that the Pew Center for Internet research produces (good AND free). Recently they released their "Generations Online in 2009" study about how different age groups use the internet. So what can we glean from the study?

Major findings:

Teens and Generation Y find entertainment and social networks online
Older generations use the internet as a tool for research, shopping and banking

So that's not too surprising, right? When you're young you have more of a social life (or at least that's true for me). More free time = more time spent on entertainment.

As you get older, your life can get more complex and time is more scarce. You use the tools you have to provide as much of that glorious free time you remember from when you were younger.

So what about email?

I think the chart below says it best. Email and search are the core activities of every online segment. I would say that email's days are not yet numbered.

Why do complaint rates vary across ISPs?

2009-03-26T16:12:27-06:00

Complaint rates are a major driver of anti-spam systems. A high complaint rate (number of "this is spam" reports relative to messages in the inbox) is known to drive bad delivery rates for commercial mailers.

One of the more interesting problems that I’ve run across at Return Path is trying to figure out why complaint rates for the same IP address (or domain) vary so widely across different ISPs. Below is a scatter chart of complaint rates for ~2,500 commercial email marketing IPs across two different ISPs. In this graph 0.05 = 5% complaint rate (5 messages per 100 places in the inbox).

What is apparent is:

Most IPs in this group have “lowish” complaint rates (<1%)
There isn’t a ton of correlation outside of that range.

So what might cause the variation in complaint rates? A partial list would include:

Differences in webmail user interface. Some ISP make it easier than others to hit "this is spam." Some ISPs allow users to report all messages in the junk mail folder as spam at the same time. However, this would seem to be more of a systematic difference that would cause the average complaint rates to be different at the two ISPs. I wouldn't necessarily expect that to drive a poor correlation.
Users at different ISPs have a different propensity to hit the "report as spam" button for different classes of mail.
Senders of email messages behave differently at different receiving domains - there appears to be a few cases of this in this sample.
Availability and use of feedback loops at different ISPs. In our analysis of the above IP addresses, this drives a large part of the variance for these IP addresses.

What does this mean practically for mailers and designers of anti-spam systems?

For anti-spam systems, there may be some value for gathering complaint data from variety of sources. This would allow you to catch IPs that are behaving well locally (in your network) but not behaving well outside of your network.

For commercial mailers, there are a few key "so whats":

Sign up for feedback loops where available. These are useful for diagnosing the cause of complaint issues.
Monitor complaint rates at each ISP. You can have a problem at one ISP and be doing well at another.

What do you think?

If You're Going to Read One Academic Anti-Spam Paper this Year ....

2009-03-04T14:21:56-07:00

I have a difficult admission to make: I read a fair number of academic anti-spam papers. We are constantly on the hunt for ideas that can make the reputation systems that Return Path runs a little bit better. There are a lot of people doing some really clever stuff out there. There are a lot of people who are sure that they have the "Final, Ultimate Solution to the Spam Problem" (FUSSP) which only requires everyone to change how they handle mail. Rarely, however, have I been as impressed with an anti-spam paper as "Spamlytics: An Empirical Analysis of Spam Marketing Conversion" by a group of researchers from the University of California, Berkeley and the University of California, San Diego. More than anything, I love the audacity of their project.

A brief summary of the project:

* The research team actually "hijacked" part of the Storm Botnet
* They modified the outbound spam from their part of the botnet to contain safe links that went to safe sites
* They measured delivery rates and conversion rates across three "campaigns" (offers) that were being sent out through the bot net.

The results are pretty interesting, in summary:

Response rates are very, very low. So low in fact that it makes you think about how much money there is in spam. For hundreds of thousands of messages sent, there are tens and hundreds of "conversions". When I do my own back of the envelope math, there has to be a ridiculously low cost for renting bot nets to make the economics go round. The authors conclude that one way that the economics could go round is for the operators of the botnet to actually "own" the offers.
Very little of this mail gets through. When they point some of these messages to seed accounts, almost none of it gets through with really good performance by Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail and Barracuda.

So, if you're going to read one academic anti-spam paper this year, I'd recommend this one.