I know what you might be thinking – hasn’t that been done before? Wasn’t that the point of SPF (Sender Policy Framework) and DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail)?

SPF and DKIM both give senders of email a way to identify themselves as the legitimate owner of a domain. And they give receivers a way to see if a given message is identified as being sent from the owner of the purported domain. What neither of them does is give senders and receivers a mechanism to communicate with each other about what to do with messages that are not authenticated. With no way for the senders and receivers to communicate there was no way to block bad email, which has led to the continued high levels of email-borne phishing attacks.

The genesis of DMARC was actually a private partnership between PayPal and Yahoo! and Google. They worked together in 2007 and 2008, respectively, to create a communication channel that would allow Google and Yahoo! to block all email purporting to be from a PayPal domain. It had a huge positive impact. At one point they were blocking, on average, 200,000 phishing messages a day.

The DMARC specification creates a scalable communication channel between every sender and every receiver and has the power to substantially reduce the damage of phishing – for end users that are subject to these attacks and to the senders whose brand is on the line. We think this specification is extremely timely as our data increasingly shows that phishing continues to move beyond the usual targets of banking and financial services and into any brand that has a high enough profile to trick consumers into clicking on malicious links.

The great news is that any brand can take advantage of DMARC today. Use our free DMARC record creator and you can begin receiving reports from Google immediately.

And Return Path’s anti-phishing solution, Domain Assurance, is already configured to accept and parse DMARC reports. We take the raw data from ISPs that support DMARC and provide intelligence, built-in logic and sophisticated alerting. This analysis enables our customers to not only better understand their email streams and which emails are not authenticating, but also details where phishing traffic is coming from, what the potential impact is upon the company’s brand, and empowers companies to make informed policy statements to block future phishing attacks with confidence.

Ready to learn more? Return Path has set up a page where you can create your DMARC record and you can sign up for our free DMARC assessment program.

Meanwhile, check out the DMARC.org website where you can view the specification, read the FAQ, sign and sign up for the discussion list.

New York, NY – January 30, 2012 – Return Path, the world’s leading email certification and reputation monitoring company, today announced it is a founding member of DMARC.org (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance), a technical working group dedicated to the development of internet standards for reducing the threat of deceptive emails known as phishing. DMARC has outlined a new vision for email authentication and published a draft specification that resolves the issues associated with widespread adoption of email authentication technologies. Leading internet service providers, including Google, Yahoo!, AOL and Microsoft, are founding members of DMARC. The group is led by Brett McDowell, Senior Manager of Customer Security Initiatives at PayPal, one of the world’s most highly spoofed brands. Return Path’s anti-phishing solution Domain Assurance supports the DMARC specifications today, enabling companies to quickly and easily implement DMARC.

“Google has worked with Return Path for more than a year now to provide their clients the tools needed to better protect Gmail users from phishing and other malicious email,” said Adam Dawes, Product Manager, Google. “Return Path’s extensive experience positions it well to improve mail senders’ authentication practices and help clean up the email channel. Most importantly, Return Path’s Domain Assurance product is already set up to support DMARC, and senders can start receiving data from Google and visualizing it with Return Path immediately.”

Enabling Widespread Deployment of an Authenticated, Trusted Email Ecosystem
According to recent Return Path data, email senders continue to struggle with email authentication, leaving brands vulnerable to phishing attacks. According to a report from the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG), more than 300 brands are hijacked by phishers every month, eroding trust in the email channel across many sectors including financial services, payment services, gaming, retail, auctions and social networks. While brands have been encouraged to use best practices in their email delivery processes including implementing SPF (Sender Policy Framework) and DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mail), two email authentication standards which help verify that an email is coming from an authorized source, ISPs have not been able to make definitive policy decisions to block unauthenticated email purporting to be from highly spoofed brands.

The DMARC specification allows brands of all sizes to empower ISPs to take action on malicious and unauthenticated email appearing to come from that brand. Data on any questionable email streams are sent back to the brand or to an intermediary such as Return Path, enabling the auditing of email streams to determine proper authentication. By creating this feedback loop between ISPs and brands, DMARC allows brands to create policy statements that instruct ISPs to block or quarantine messages that aren’t properly authenticated, providing the necessary framework to thwart phishing attempts and enabling widespread deployment of a trusted email ecosystem.

“Email has changed the way the world communicates. But many of the attributes that have made it great – it’s openness, it’s interoperability – have also made it vulnerable to malicious activity. The beauty of DMARC is that it attempts to address the security threats to the email ecosystem without impacting its utility as a communication channel,” said Matt Blumberg, CEO, Return Path. “Return Path is proud to support the DMARC standard and we encourage companies to implement it as quickly as they can. Fast, widespread adoption of DMARC will make a significant dent in scammers ability to perpetuate crime through email.”

Domain Assurance Supports DMARC Specifications
Return Path’s anti-phishing solution, Domain Assurance supports the DMARC specifications allowing companies to deploy DMARC easily. Domain Assurance takes the raw data from ISPs that support DMARC and delivers the necessary intelligence, built-in logic and sophisticated alerting that shows where a company’s implementation is broken or where a company is being spoofed. Domain Assurance receives the data being sent from ISPs that provide DMARC authentication results data (as well as other sources of authentication results data from ISPs that don’t use DMARC) and provides detailed reporting, including information about every message sent on a brand’s behalf, whether legitimate or not.

This data enables brands to not only better understand their email streams and which emails are not authenticating, but also empowers them with the ability to understand where phishing traffic is coming from, what the potential impact is from criminal activity, and a means to create policy statements to block future phishing attacks. Leveraging its extensive network and relationships with Google, Hotmail, Yahoo! and more than 70 other global ISP partners, along with access to over 2.2 billion messages a day, Return Path receives more phishing data than anybody else in the industry, providing the ability to identify, alert on, and block more phishing attacks. Domain Assurance bridges the gap between senders and their ISP, blocking fraudulent phishing email before it reaches end-user recipients. Return Path also fraudcasts phishing URLs and IP addresses to third party security and take-down vendors to broaden protection against phishing threats.

Visit this page to learn more about DMARC and Return Path Domain Assurance and to generate your own DMARC record.

About Return Path
Return Path makes email work better by scoring and certifying email senders from around the world. We help marketers, publishers and other large-volume email senders increase their response rates by providing the world’s leading inbox deliverability solution. We help mailbox providers and email administrators at ISPs and enterprises block unwelcome and malicious email by providing near real-time IP reputation scores and other data-driven tools. Taken as a whole, these tools and services improve the consumer experience of email by protecting them from spam, phishing and other abuse. Return Path offers free access to Sender Score, the email reputation measure compiled through our cooperative data network of ISPs and other email receivers, at our reputation portal: www.senderscore.org. Information about Return Path can be found at www.returnpath.net.

About DMARC.org
DMARC.org (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance) is an unincorporated working group made up of many of the world’s leading email providers (AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail), financial institutions and service providers (Bank of America, Fidelity Investments, PayPal), social media properties (American Greetings, Facebook, LinkedIn) and mail security solutions providers (Agari, Cloudmark, Return Path, Trusted Domain Project). The group is dedicated to developing Internet standards to reduce the threat of email phishing and to improve coordination between email providers and mail sender domain owners.

The draft specification and further information can be found at www.dmarc.org.

Contacts:

Tami Forman
Return Path
+1 646 367 3905
tami.forman@returnpath.net

Ilona Mohacsi
PenVine for Return Path
+1 631.764.3729
ilona@penvine.com

If you’ve used email for any length of time, it should come as no surprise that financial institutions and financial services companies of all sizes are the most frequent targets of phishing. According to the December 2011 RSA Monthly Online Fraud Report, phishing against banks in the United States targeted nationwide or large regional banks 91% of the time. In fact, the prevailing trend has been that phishing incidents continue to rise while overall spam volumes have been on the decline, and the frequency of targeted phishing attacks is also increasing. Phishing as a vector for cyber crime is not going away. It’s only becoming more dangerous and difficult for users to discern legitimate emails from fraudulent ones.

I view this as a great opportunity for Return Path as well as for the FI members of the BITS and FS-ISAC organizations to fight back. Email phishing and fraud continually ranks near the top of the list of concerns facing financial services companies causing billions of dollars per year in hard-dollar losses. Additionally, there are serious brand loyalty and customer trust issues that are by-products of phishing attacks that are more difficult to measure, but have obvious effects on email engagement and click-through. These factors together can also ultimately have an effect on deliverability. Return Path is uniquely able to address all of these issues in a single comprehensive product suite.

In conjunction with today’s announcement, Return Path is also offering a special offer on Domain Assurance for all BITS and FS-ISAC members. Learn more here.

Email Dependability: Loss of Trust and Email Deliverability Failures
According to the most recent Anti-Phishing Work Group (APWG) report, Financial Services continue to be the most targeted industry sector with over 47% of all phishing attacks targeting financial service brands. For Financial Services companies, email dependability is seriously affected when customers suffer a loss of trust in the company brand as a result of phishing attempts and fraudulent emails. In addition to phishing attacks affecting email dependability, Return Path’s research shows that on average about 20% of commercial email messages are not delivered to the targeted inbox as intended, but are blocked or filtered erroneously before reaching their destination. Taken together, these two data points represent a double whammy for leading financial institutions – the result being customers seeing fraudulent messages in their inbox, and not receiving real emails from the brands they trust.

“Financial institutions continue to find innovative ways to safeguard the email channel and to protect their customers’ data,” said BITS President Paul Smocer. “We are excited to partner with Return Path, whose services provide an information link between financial services companies and ISPs that will deepen an institution’s ability to prevent fraud.”

“The relationship that consumers have with their financial institution requires the highest degree of trust,” said Matt Blumberg, CEO, Return Path. “There is very little room for mistakes of any kind. For more than a decade, Return Path has worked with the world’s largest and most respected financial services companies to ensure their email communications arrive safely into the inboxes of their customers. With our Domain Assurance service, we protect brands and their customers from malicious email. We are excited by the opportunity to empower members of BITS and FS-ISAC with the ability to achieve highly dependable, trusted email communication between their companies and their clients.”

The Return Path Offer
As the global leader in email certification solutions trusted by over 2,500 top brands, Return Path leverages its extensive network and relationships with over 70 of the world’s largest ISPs, receiving data on more phishing attacks than any other industry player. With Return Path’s FS-ISAC and BITS financial services offer members receive:

• Complimentary Email Authentication Scorecard – A customized and prioritized list of actions to take to improve email authentication for the company’s top email sending domains.
• Complimentary Email Authentication Business Case – Business case to help justify the remediation of email authentication issues based on real-world examples and costs.
• Complimentary 90 Day Access to Domain Assurance – Full access to Return Path Domain Assurance, providing the ability to:
- Observe and block phishing and spoofing attacks on the company brand.
- Identify legitimate mail servers that are not authenticating (“missed”) or are failing authentication (“broken”) by ISP networks.
- Receive real-time alerts into email-borne phishing and spoofing attacks.
- Protect domains from attacks by adding them to the Domain Assurance Registry, ensuring email policy enforcement by member ISPs.
- Collect feeds of suspicious URLs and email addresses from known phishing attempts for additional analysis and remediation.
- Expand protection beyond the Domain Assurance registry with a feed of phishing URLs delivered to other major security services.
• Complimentary inbox placement and email reputation audit – In depth review of whether email is being delivered across Return Path’s ISP network and whether there are any reputation issues such as end-user complaints, spam trap hits, high unknown user rates, low end user engagement and other factors.

Return Path is also offering a discount to FS-ISAC and BITS members who become new Return Path clients.
For more information about the BITS and FS-ISAC offer, Domain Assurance and Return Path’s Deliverability Services, please click here.

About Return Path
Return Path makes email work better by scoring and certifying email senders from around the world. We help marketers, publishers and other large-volume email senders increase their response rates by providing the world’s leading inbox deliverability solution. We help mailbox providers and email administrators at ISPs and enterprises block unwelcome and malicious email by providing near real-time IP reputation scores and other data-driven tools. Taken as a whole, these tools and services improve the consumer experience of email by protecting them from spam, phishing and other abuse. Return Path offers free access to Sender Score, the email reputation measure compiled through our cooperative data network of ISPs and other email receivers, at our reputation portal: www.senderscore.org. Information about Return Path can be found at www.returnpath.net.

About BITS
BITS addresses issues at the intersection of financial services, technology and public policy, where industry cooperation serves the public good, such as critical infrastructure protection, fraud prevention, and the safety of financial services. BITS is the technology policy division of The Financial Services Roundtable, which represents 100 of the largest integrated financial services companies providing banking, insurance, and investment products and services to the American consumer.

About FS-ISAC
The Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center (FS-ISAC) was formed in 1999 and is a non-profit, private financial sector initiative. It was designed and developed and is owned by financial institutions. Its primary function is to share timely, relevant and actionable information of physical and cyber security threat and incident information to help mitigate the risk associated with these threats.

Contacts:

Tami Forman
Return Path
+1 646 367 3905
tami.forman@returnpath.net

Ilona Mohacsi
PenVine for Return Path
+1 631.764.3729
ilona@penvine.com

Today we are launching a new survey to help us establish a baseline for awareness and perceptions of all aspects of the DMA on behalf of all members of the marketing community.

Whether or not you are a DMA or EEC member – in some ways, it’s even more important for non-members to take this – I’d greatly appreciate you taking 10 minutes to fill out this survey. It will help us continue to reshape the association to meet the needs of the community, as this survey will serve as the foundation for our new strategic plan, membership outreach and communications, conference programming, councils, and everything else we do.

Skincare product specialist Rodial increased its revenue from its email channel by more than 200 per cent over one week using best practices in its email marketing campaigns. Working with Return Path – the world’s leading email certification and reputation monitoring company – and Dotmailer, Rodial is now seeing almost 100 per cent of its sent emails reach subscribers’ inboxes, resulting in a huge increase in consumers’ click-throughs.

Rodial sends around one million emails every month promoting its products, latest offers and endorsements from celebrities including Sienna Miller and Kate Moss. It found many of these emails were failing to reach consumers because key product names, such as ‘Tummy Tuck’ and ‘Crash Diet’, are also terms that trigger ISPs’ spam filters.

The beauty brand used Return Path’s Mailbox Monitor tool to track a range of metrics that were affecting its email reputation – of how ISPs and spam filters react to a company’s emails. The metrics include the percentage of Rodial’s sent emails that reach subscribers’ inboxes, as well as the number of emails that fell into spam folders or went missing completely.

Rodial then joined Return Path’s Certification Program, the world’s largest whitelist covering more than 2.1 billion inboxes worldwide which is used by many leading ISPs and filtering companies to identify legitimate email senders. Once certified, the amount of Rodial’s emails reaching subscribers’ inboxes jumped by more than 25 per cent.

Rodial is now seeing 98.7 per cent of its sent emails delivered to consumers’ inboxes, rather than hitting spam folders or going missing completely. The enhanced delivery rate resulted in consumers’ responses to the brand’s email marketing campaigns rocketing, with click-through rates increasing by more than 55 per cent.

Eliza Wells, PR, E-Commerce & Marketing Manager at Rodial, said: “If our emails don’t reach the inbox, then our customers don’t get the information they have asked for, hence why strong and consistent inbox placement a top priority for us. Being a Return Path Certified Sender and being part of its leading whitelist program has had a tremendous effect and positively impacted our overall e-commerce effectiveness. We are now achieving higher response from our programmes as well as increased ROI.”

“Our marketplace is extremely competitive which makes share of mind critically important. This is why we focus a lot on celebrity endorsements and also why our email campaigns fulfil a vital role in our marketing programmes.”

Richard Gibson, Channel Relationship Manager at Return Path, said: “Rodial is reliant upon the success of its email marketing campaigns and quickly realised the benefit of Return Path’s Certification Program and expertise in utilising email best practices. The dramatic increase Rodial saw in revenue and the boost to customers’ click-throughs on its emails is testament to the importance of identifying and acting upon email reputation issues. Rodial has earned its place in its subscribers’ inboxes by effectively proving its ‘not spam’ status.”

Download the Rodial case study here.

-ends-

Notes to editors: For further editorial information or to arrange interviews contact returnpath@pwkpr.com or telephone +44 20 7609 1900.

About Return Path
Return Path makes email work better by scoring and certifying email senders from around the world. We help marketers, publishers and other large-volume email senders increase their response rates by providing the world’s leading inbox deliverability solution. We help mailbox providers and email administrators at ISPs and enterprises block unwelcome and malicious email by providing near real-time IP reputation scores and other data-driven tools. Taken as a whole, these tools and services improve the consumer experience of email by protecting them from spam, phishing and other abuse. Return Path offers free access to Sender Score, the email reputation measure compiled through our cooperative data network of ISPs and other email receivers, at our reputation portal: www.senderscore.org. Information about Return Path can be found at www.returnpath.net.

About Rodial
Rodial’s skincare products deliver targeted treatments to skin concerns, combining the best of anti-ageing and firming ingredients. Rodial delivers the ultimate in skincare through the combination of its laboratory’s scientific expertise and clinical testing and its unique knowledge of natural skin treatments. Rodial products are dermatologically tested and recommended by dermatologists and plastic surgeons in the UK.

New York City and Austin, TX – January 10, 2012 – Return Path, Inc., the world’s leading email certification and reputation monitoring company, today announced as part of its on-going mission to make email work better, it has acquired OtherInbox, Inc., (OIB). The Austin-based company works with top-tier email providers like Yahoo! and Gmail to improve the inbox experience by automatically organizing emails from online shopping and social networking sites and easily stopping unwanted emails. OtherInbox has helped organize more than 2 million mailboxes and billions of email messages.

Helping Manage Inbox Overload
OtherInbox works with some of the world’s largest internet service providers to enhance the consumer experience of email with cutting edge productivity solutions that manage email overload. The OIB tools provide consumers with a superior level of control over how best to manage their inbox than is currently available in most standard email offerings. The OtherInbox tool help consumers read the emails they want and ignore the ones they don’t, without the user having to change their email address or learn anything new. OtherInbox’s Unsubscribe feature allows consumers to drop unwanted email into a designated folder to have their address automatically removed from those mailing lists. These features, which will continue to be offered free to consumers, are critical to helping people cope with the vast amounts of email they receive and dovetail with Return Path’s industry leading email deliverability and reputation management offerings.

In addition, OtherInbox will enhance Return Path’s Sender Score reputation scoring system, which is widely used by companies to make better blocking and filtering decisions. Data from OtherInbox will also be used as part of Return Path’s Certification program, to enhance the reputation measurement for Certified mailers and to help enforce compliance for participants in ensuring and identifying email that is truly wanted by consumers.

Return Path Expands its Corporate Footprint
Return Path continues to grow its global footprint and with this acquisition expands its North American presence into Austin, Texas. OtherInbox remains a wholly-owned subsidiary, retaining all its employees and continues to operate independently with Joshua Baer as CEO.

“We are delighted to have the OtherInbox team members join the Return Path family in our common goal of making email work better and end messaging abuse,” said Matt Blumberg, CEO of Return Path. “By leveraging our core strengths in developing cutting edge technology, providing insight into consumer email preferences and global best practices, our respective teams will continue to deliver value to consumers, marketers, ISPs and mailbox providers that ensure meaningful email communications.”

About Return Path
Return Path makes email work better by scoring and certifying email senders from around the world. We help marketers, publishers and other large-volume email senders increase their response rates by providing the world’s leading inbox deliverability solution. We help mailbox providers and email administrators at ISPs and enterprises block unwelcome and malicious email by providing near real-time IP reputation scores and other data-driven tools. Taken as a whole, these tools and services improve the consumer experience of email by protecting them from spam, phishing and other abuse. Return Path offers free access to Sender Score, the email reputation measure compiled through our cooperative data network of ISPs and other email receivers, at our reputation portal: www.senderscore.org. Information about Return Path can be found at www.returnpath.net.

About OtherInbox
OtherInbox saves you time and cuts down on unwanted emails. You don’t have to learn anything new or change your email address – we work with what you’ve got. More than 2 million people think that their Aol, Gmail or Yahoo Mail inbox is better with OtherInbox. Automatic Organizer cleans up your inbox by putting receipts, newsletters, and Facebook messages into folders. Every morning you get a daily summary to make sure that you don’t miss anything important. When you get a shipping notice, it automatically shows up on your calendar in Outlook or Google Calendar. Unsubscriber is the simplest way to stop emails you don’t want. Just put the messages that you don’t want into the Unsubscribe folder and forget about them. Unsubscriber will make sure that you don’t ever see any messages from them again, plus it will actually try to click the links and get you off the list. OtherInbox, Inc. is proudly based in Austin, Texas and is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Return Path, Inc.

Contacts:

Tami Forman
Return Path
+1 646 367 3905
tami.forman@returnpath.net

Ilona Mohacsi
PenVine for Return Path
+1 631.764.3729
ilona@penvine.com

Here are my four for 2012:

1. ISPs will not block messages to all users based on lack of engagement, but engagement will matter more than ever. This is a twist on my prediction from last year, but I’m going to be a bolder this year. I don’t think ISPs will ever block messages to every user based on low click and open rates. ISPs are very queasy about blocking messages that consumers might want. They have enough data to show that when a substantial percentage of users proactively hit “this is spam” on a message that it is unwanted by the majority of users. They don’t have the same confidence that low engagement by a portion (even a big portion) of users means all the rest don’t want that message. They aren’t even sure the unengaged subscribers want those messages blocked. But that doesn’t mean engagement doesn’t matter. It matters for a lot of other reasons, as I said last year, and I think will matter even more for marketing effectiveness in 2012.

2. Domain reputation will not be implemented in 2012, but planning for it will happen in earnest. Despite what most people have been saying about continued availability of IPv4 addresses they won’t actually run out until 2013 at the earliest. This means that ISPs will continue to use the IP reputation model for another couple years, but will use 2012 to plan and determine how to move to a domain reputation model.

3. Mobile will not be the dominant platform for reading email, but it will continue to steal share. To the surprise of many, our recent report on where email is read still shows that mobile devices are #3 after webmail and installed software on desktop computers. But the growth rate is high and climbing. The same report found the growth of mobile email views to be 34%. Expect continued growth of mobile in 2012 – with some of that growth being stolen from web and desktop viewing and some as a result of overall increased viewership of email.

4. Social networks will not become the dominant messaging platform, but they will drive more email use. Last year I predicted that Facebook would not kill Gmail and I was right. I’m going to go ahead and say that 2012 will not be the year that social networks become the dominant platform for messages. I’m not so sure it will ever happen, but it will be many more years off, at a minimum. Instead I think you will see the opposite in 2012 – the growth of social networks (which will definitely continue) will actually fuel the growth of email through notifications and the like.

What do you predict will or will not happen in 2012? Leave a comment to let us know.

1. Engagement data will not be the key to inbox placement.
The reckoning: Mostly true. Reputation, as measured primarily by complaints, unknown user rates and spam trap hits, is still the key to high inbox placement rates. Some ISPs experimented in 2011 with engagement as a way to determine inbox treatment – meaning, does the email go into, for example, Priority Inbox. Going back to 2010 we saw Hotmail implement individual-level filtering based on engagement, but this was intended to deliver messages that would otherwise be blocked, not the reverse. In 2011 we did not see any major ISPs begin wholesale blocking of messages based on low engagement rates.

2. “Do-not-track” legislation will not End Marketing As We Know It.
The reckoning: True — the FTC hasn’t endorsed anything as of yet, so it’s business as usual.

3. Facebook’s “UnEmail” will not kill Gmail.
The reckoning: True to the 11th power. In fact, my team looked at data from our Campaign Insight tool (which shows where email is opened) to confirm this one. We registered a whopping 0 opens in Facebook. Even Myspace mail (yes, you read that right – MySpace) had more opens that Facebook (but still a miniscule number with .01% total opens from all of our clients using Campaign Insight).

What did you predict would or would not happen in 2011? How’d you do?

But, let’s pretend for a moment that I’m Jane Average Consumer. As Jane A. Consumer, I am not happy to suddenly get emails from a store out of the blue, Christmas or not. I’m also not happy about the fact that they are sending me coupons every day. I like to shop and all, but really? And lastly, I am not happy that at the end of it all, they will probably continue to email me until I surrender and unsubscribe. (But remember, I might be afraid of the unsubscribe link or am so annoyed that I don’t want to bother to find that link, so the likelihood is high that I will report spam on the message. And I’ll have plenty of messages to click spam on as they pile up in my inbox before I decide to do something.)

I get why The Golf Store wants to send me email. They know I buy golf stuff during the holidays. The holidays have rolled around again, and they want to be sure to remind me that I have family members that like golf and that I shopped in their store before. Some marketing experts will say that it’s acceptable to start mailing a previous purchaser – as long as they are not in your unsubscribe file – during the holidays. I agree in principle, but think there is a right way and a wrong way to do it. One way will lead to spam complaints, repeated spamtrap hits, and unsubscribes. The other will lead to a list of verified customers who are likely to purchase from you and who you can safely mail to again next year.

So, if you sell golf supplies, neckties, non-fiction books, or sports paraphernalia, please consider the following if you want me to shop with you this holiday season:

Say hi, ask to come in: Sending me coupons out of the blue without reminding me who you are and why I care will lead to complaints and/or spamtrap hits. Rather than adding me to your list and sending me daily coupons out of the blue, why not ask if I want them? Send me an email saying “Hey Jane, you bought stuff from us last year during the holidays. We think that means you like to buy golf supplies as gifts. Got anyone on your list that you need to shop for? Click here to sign up and we’ll send you coupons throughout the holiday season.” Better yet, remind me of what I bought last year and make some suggestions. Give me a really awesome coupon if I make a purchase within a certain number of days.

Control yourself: I’m not Tiger Woods. I don’t need new clubs very often. As a matter of fact, I don’t even play golf. Please don’t assume that I want your mail every day. How about once a week, or better yet, give me some choices. By emailing me daily, you increase the chance that I will report you as spam or unsubscribe, and you can never mail to me again.

Don’t overstay your welcome: When the holidays are done, send me an email asking me if I want to stay on the list. Encourage me to unsubscribe if I have no foreseeable purchases. Or, offer to take me off the list until next year. Either way, make it easy on me, or I’ll probably end up reporting your mail as spam eventually… if I don’t turn into a spam trap first.

Invite me back: If I unsubscribe, consider asking me if I’d like you to stop by again next year, especially if I purchased something. After all, I buy golf stuff during the holidays. You know this. Better yet, ask me if there any other times during the year that I might want to buy neckties, non-fiction books, or sports paraphernalia.

Remember, you get the best delivery when you treat consumers with respect, give them choices, respect their preferences, and stay connected and targeted. After all, it’s not the number of inboxes you reach, it’s what inboxes you reach that counts.