'Net Features : return path

Fight Phishing with Return Path

Amberly Dressler — Thu, 02 May 2013 17:49:00 GMT

The reputational cost to a brand as a result of a phishing attack is approximately $1900 per infected user, according to a Cisco report. Can you afford that?

Return Path, an email intelligence company, recently announced a solution to help brand marketers combat phishing attacks (and save face and money) from all email domains by offering visibility into fraudulent email appearing to originate from a company’s own sending domains. Complementing traditional authentication-based solutions such as DMARC, the new Anti-Phishing Solution provides companies with visibility into the entire spectrum of phishing attacks against their brands, Return Path reports.

“Phishing remains a serious threat to online trust and the reliability of the email channel, and efforts like this from an Anti-Phishing Working Group member company represent important progress toward eradicating it,” said Foy Shiver, Deputy Secretary-General, APWG.

Return Path tells us there are essentially two fronts where phishers wage war: from a brand’s own domain, and so-called “lookalike domains” – close variants of brand names – entirely unrelated to the brands to fool the brand’s customers. Return Path gives this example: These phishers will create a dot com address using a ‘1’ instead of an ‘L,’ which often look similar at first-glance. These non-domain phishing attacks, which are the most prevalent type of attack, pose a serious and significant threat to consumers and the brand’s online equity.

Traditional authentication-based solutions, such as DMARC, offer visibility into fraudulent email appearing to originate from a company’s own sending domains, according to Return Path. However, it is estimated more than half of all phishing attacks actually originate from the “lookalike domains."

“This is a monumental breakthrough in the fight to protect companies and consumers from phishing and other forms of email brand abuse. Our clients have reported that more than half of phishing attacks against their brands appear to come from domains beyond their control. Now brands can detect and mitigate attempts to use their names to deceive consumers through email regardless of where the messages appear to come from,” said Ken Takahashi, general manager of Anti-Phishing Solutions at Return Path. “Phishing is a security problem, but solving it isn’t a conventional security challenge, it’s a big data challenge.”

Mobile Email Opens Top Desktop, Webmail

Amberly Dressler — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 17:05:00 GMT

As Web workers, we knew the time would come when email open rates on mobile devices surpassed their desktop counterpart. A lot of us, however, didn’t know it would be this soon.

Findings from Return Path’s newest mobile email report made it official. The email intelligence company found users in the U.S. and Canada largely check email from their phones. In fact, after examining nearly 1.8 billion data points from April 2012 through October 2012, Return Path found 38 percent of U.S. users opened emails on smartphones, as opposed to 31 percent on Webmail and 31 percent on desktop.

Interestingly, the report also states that user prefer to open retail emails on their smartphones (40 percent), consumer products (40 percent) and real estate (38 percent), while banking emails are mostly opened from desktop email clients (60 percent) like Outlook.

“The data shows a clear opportunity for marketers who take audience device and platform preference into consideration when leveraging the email channel. Using analytics to gather email intelligence can tell marketers when and where resources should be invested into a mobile marketing strategy to maximize their budget,” said Matt Blumberg, CEO of Return Path. “Marketers who rely on open rates, without incorporating more sophisticated ways to evaluate campaign success, stand to lose significant revenue.”

Additionally, email marketing campaigns not optimized for both mobile and desktop are missing out on valuable opportunities. Fortunately, there are some “golden rules” to mobile optimized email.

Return Path also uncovered data that suggests mobile behavior varies depending on the smartphone operating system.

More Apple users are using their devices to open and read email than any other group, with the iPad seeing more growth in email opens when compared to the iPhone; the release of the iPad Mini should further increase its share of opens
Windows Mobile saw an 85 percent increase in email opens since Return Path’s April 2012 report, but still only comprise 0.3 percent of total email opens on smartphones

Return Path’s infograph is available here.

Inbox Placement Declines (Again)

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 17:05:00 GMT

If you’re using email marketing to promote your digital presence, know that all senders have serious issues to contend with - none more significant than inbox placement.

According to Return Path’s recently released Email Intelligence Report, marketers account for 70 percent of “this is spam” complaints and 60 percent of all “spam trap hits”, considerably higher than botnets which account for just three percent of complaints and 11 percent of spam trap hits. The problem is that the majority of “this is spam” complaints are actually legitimate newsletters, offers or notifications according to Return Path. The result? Inbox placements when compared to the same period last year are approximately five percent lower, continuing a long and precipitous decline over the past ten years.

“The high rate of marketers sending messages to spam traps underscores just how important it is for companies to keep target lists updated and put email marketing best practices into place,” said George Bilbrey, Return Path co-founder and president. “Oftentimes marketers may feel the return on investment is strong enough that a ‘large blast’ with some bounce backs isn’t a big deal, but what may seem like a nominal problem could in fact be a much larger issue if recipients begin associating their brand with spam and ultimately make decisions based on that perception.”

Several other interesting highlights from the report include:
- Latin America has the lowest inbox placement (69 percent) and experience an 11 percent decline.
- Email related to financial services has the greatest chance of being blocked or going missing.
- Retail and gaming-related emails have the best chance of inbox placement.

Intelligence To Pass Email’s Toughest Tests

Michael Garrity — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 20:00:00 GMT

It’s been a busy week for the folks at Return Path, as the inbox placement solutions provider has apparently been hard at work developing a suite of new tools aimed at solving “email’s toughest measurement and analytics challenges” for its customers, including achieving inbox placement, gaining an advantage over their competitors and preventing phishing and spoofing.

First up is the new Inbox Insight tool that offers competitive intelligence and benchmarking of those crucial metrics that drive rapid improvements in email marketing performance. With Inbox Insight, marketers will be able to optimize their email programs thanks to access to competitive performance data and engagement metrics that are taken from information across multiple leading mailbox providers and almost 2 million email subscribers.

Inbox Insight will provide full visibility into competitive campaigns using real subscriber activity data and engagement actions, including the percentage of emails that were read, forwarded, deleted after reading or deleted without reading, as well as subscriber engagement levels, ISP-marked spam, user-marked spam and more. Best of all, marketers can use the tool to view the results of their email campaigns against their key competitors to see what is encouraging the most engagement in their industry.

Sticking with the inbox, Return Path is now also offering Inbox Monitor, which grants increased visibility into a client’s inbox placement rate (IPR) using the same subscriber data, as well as advanced seed-list technology, thus providing meaningful and actionable intelligence that allows marketers to assess and improve inbox placement issues on an ISP-by-ISP basis. Ultimately, this will help maximize both inbox placement and campaign ROI with relevant insights about overall campaign performance, while also identifying issues that result in lower inbox placement.

Finally, Return Path wants to help its clients better brand themselves. In an effort to help preserve customer trust in the company’s emails channel, the new Email Brand Monitor tool studies an organization’s email streams “to ensure proper authentication” and “combat phishing attempts disguised as outbound email” coming from the business. It will also give marketers more information about known, unknown and potentially fraudulent email traffic. Through daily and weekly digest reports, Email Brand Monitor helps keep marketers in-the-know and helps them maintain the email standards of their clients, even when they use third-party mailing services.

Overall, the Email Intelligence Suite for Marketers was created to help maximize the performance and accountability of email campaigns by incorporating access to data, analytics and actionable insights that drive optimal performance, as each of the tools uniquely addresses key challenges facing email marketers today.

Global Email Spam Rates on the Rise

Linc Wonham — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 18:00:00 GMT

A new study by email certification and reputation monitoring company Return Path tracked more than 130 million IP addresses and nearly 20 trillion messages last year and concluded that 85 percent of them were classified as spam, posing an on-going challenge for ISPs.

The research used Sender Score, an index of an email sender’s reputation and a measure of the same metrics that ISPs use when making deliverability decisions. Businesses with high sender reputations or Sender Scores above 90 saw 95 percent of their messages delivered on average, whereas those with lower sender reputations, Sender Scores between 60 and 89 — the majority of businesses — saw delivery rates of only 68 percent on average.

Return Path studied senders’ reputations across the globe and industry sectors examining the major factors affecting inbox deliverability, including the following:

•    Unknown user rates or those email addresses no longer in active use
•    Complaint rates, when email recipients mark a message as spam
•    Spam traps set by ISPs to deliberately catch spammers

Industry Breakdown
While most industry sectors performed at or near global averages, there were significant outliers in a number of categories. There was a high frequency of spam traps among social networking senders.

One of the most important tools social networks use to grow their subscriber base is the address books of their current users. This presents a risk as most email recipients do not actively manage their address books, resulting in numerous unused or abandoned emails being present.

As a result, social networking sites were hitting an average of 20 spam traps, as opposed to the global average of 1 to 3. Social networking and gaming had the highest degree of unknown user rates, around 5 percent for the same reasons as mentioned above.

Banking, retail and social networking had the highest complaint rates, coming in at over 3 percent, whereas on average other industries had complaint rates of 2 percent.

Geographic Breakdown
There is a marked increase in the worldwide number of senders and a sharp decline in inbox placement rates (IPRs). While every country and region has different challenges, universally speaking, marketers with poor reputations have significantly lower chances of making it to the inbox.

When emails fail to reach inboxes, businesses fail to communicate, resulting in a direct impact on the bottom line.

North America’s Sender Score of 67 was the highest of any region. Canada had the highest reputation metrics with a score of 70, while the U.S. weighed in at 67. Despite having the highest sending reputations globally, both the U.S. and Canada have issues with complaints, unknown users and spam traps.

The U.S. also has very few restrictions around non-permission acquisition of email addresses, which puts marketers at risk for acquiring spam traps and receiving high subscriber complaints.

European Results
Reputation metrics in Europe were surprisingly poor given the strict laws around acquiring email addresses. In Germany, where double opt-in has been the law, the average Sender Score was 33, and complaint rates, unknown users and spam traps were all above average.

At a score of 47, France had one of the highest Sender Scores in Europe, but had the biggest problem with high unknown users and spam traps, at 10 percent and 11 percent, respectively, indicating that marketers have issues with list hygiene and keeping their lists up-to-date. Italy and Spain also had slightly above average complaints, unknown users and spam traps with Sender Scores coming in very low at 22 and 27, respectively.

The U.K. had the highest Sender Score of 51, but is struggling with unknown user rates of 6 percent and spam trap rates of an average of 6 per IP address. These findings indicate that European marketers are at high risk for blocking and filtering.

China’s low Sender Score of 36 is not surprising as it is an emerging market and senders may have a harder time understanding reputation factors and what it takes to get delivered to inboxes outside of China. While their reputation metrics appear to be low, it’s because a majority of their email is blocked and never delivered.

Australia has typically high deliverability rates, which is somewhat reflected in their Sender Score of 56. However, with unknown user rates at 9 percent and having nearly 6 spam traps per IP address, marketers need to focus on how they acquire and handle new and old addresses, the report suggests.

An emerging market in which email marketing is still relatively new, Brazil is struggling with deliverability and sender reputation. Brazil sends out a lot of email that would be considered spam resulting in the extremely low Sender Score of 16. With a complaint rate of 3 percent, unknown user rate of 7 percent and average spam traps at nearly 5 percent, most Brazilian marketers have a long road ahead in resolving their deliverability and reputation issues.

The complete study and infographic are available for download.

Return to Sender: Inbox Placement Rates Plunge

Linc Wonham — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 18:00:00 GMT

Worldwide inbox placement rates declined sharply in the second half of 2011, according to the latest Global Email Deliverability Benchmark report from Return Path.

Historically, inbox placement rates (IPR) have remained steady at around 80 percent with one in five emails being delivered to a spam folder or blocked. For the first time in three years, Return Path saw a major decline of 6 percent that brought inbox placement rates to a record low of 76.5 percent globally in the second half of 2011, compared to 81 percent in the first half.

Reasons for the decline
According to the study, reasons for the significant decline in IPR include ISPs raising the bar on reputation metrics, making it harder than ever for marketers to get into the inbox. ISPs are using metrics that are generally unavailable to marketers through traditional deployment platforms and leveraging new data to determine spam from not-spam.

These metrics include engagement data, subscriber panel complaint data, and trusted subscriber data making deliverability extremely challenging for marketers not using data monitoring tools. Marketing metrics are also sliding in the wrong direction whether due to slashed marketing budgets, new staffing or reliance on third-party ESPs for reputation monitoring.

A third major reason for declining IPR is that consumers are overloaded, especially during the busy holiday period. Many consumers enthusiastically sign up for new emails, whether to access special deals, get interesting content or as part of a purchase process. When the emails arrive in the inbox the amount appears overwhelming, with consumers using the “report junk” button to unsubscribe from excess emails to cope with the avalanche.

“The findings from our report show the effects of a perfect storm,” says Matt Blumberg, CEO of Return Path. “Clients are having difficulty in getting their emails delivered, ISPs are tightening requirements on reputation metrics and the number of companies using email to market continues to increase. We see both higher overall email volume and an influx of relatively unsophisticated senders – resulting in decreased inbox placement rates.”

Inbox technologies see a dip
In addition to conducting the Global Email Deliverability Benchmark Report, Return Path analyzed a panel sample of over 40,000 Gmail mailboxes and over 110 million messages from July 1 to December 31, 2011. Ninety-three percent of all Gmail subscribers now have priority inbox enabled, up 15 percent from Return Path’s previous study, but Gmail inbox placement rates declined to 79 percent with 21 percent of mail being delivered to the spam folder.

Out of the 79 percent of mail delivered to the inbox, only 8 percent was marked priority, a 54-percent decline compared to Return Path’s previous study.

Overcoming deliverability challenges
While the second half of 2011 proved to be challenging across several industries, marketers taking proactive steps to improve deliverability have major opportunities to increase their revenue through the email channel.

“When marketers focus on improving their program’s deliverability, they do,” adds Blumberg. “One-hundred percent deliverability is attainable. Opportunity is there for all smart marketers to beat their competitors by monitoring their reputation, understanding deliverability data and staying ahead of the deliverability curve.”

Email Deliverability Still Plagues Marketers

Linc Wonham — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 02:00:00 GMT

Email certification and reputation monitoring company Return Path has announced the findings from its Global Email Deliverability Benchmark Report, which indicate that email deliverability still plagues commercial email senders worldwide with only 81 percent of all permissioned email making it to the inbox.

Globally, 1 out of every 5 emails is not delivered to the intended recipient, with 7 percent landing either in a spam or junk folder and 12 percent simply missing. While deliverability rates vary by each region, Return Path’s research points to the following three key factors:

• Senders continue to believe the “bounce rate myth” or whatever gets sent and doesn’t bounce must be reaching the inbox. This isn’t the case. Senders are only notified when their email is a hard bounce, not if it’s been placed in a junk or spam folder. The rate that senders must understand is their inbox placement rate - the number of emails that actually arrive in the inbox.

• Deliverability failures cost businesses money but these failures are masked by revenue generation from email campaigns. Assuming that a program that generates revenue or gets good response must be delivered to all the inboxes that matter is a mistake. There is significant lost revenue from email that does not get delivered to the inbox and senders need to take deliverability failures more seriously.

• Many senders are still resistant to implementing the best practices that make email deliverability more likely and more consistent. Return Path research shows high percentages of top brands are missing basic best practices like welcome messages, efficient opt-out procedures and appropriate permission levels.

Key Regional Findings
North American deliverability is globally the highest with 86 percent of emails making it to the intended recipient. Canada has a high rate of email that goes missing at 12.2 percent, but only 2.56 percent is delivered to the spam or junk folder. The United States has a more equal balance of email that goes missing at 5.9 percent and email delivered to the junk or spam folder at 7.56 percent.

In Europe, for the first half of 2011, approximately 1 in 6 legitimate emails or 16.5 percent never reached the subscriber inbox. Additionally, more than 1 in 10 commercial emails or 10.4 percent is missing, blocked by ISPs before reaching their intended recipient. In comparison, Europe lags a full three percentage points at 83.5 percent behind North American deliverability rates of 86.5 percent.

In Central and Latin America, email delivery continues to be a major hurdle with 62 percent or the equivalent of only 6 out of every 10 emails making it to the inbox. Of the remaining 38 percent of emails, 21 percent is rejected at the ISP-level and 17 percent is put in the junk or spam folders. This is particularly problematic in Brazil. With a full 25 percent of all permissioned email being delivered to the spam or junk folders and 1 out of every 10 emails or 11 percent going missing, only 64 percent of all email gets delivered to Brazilian inboxes. In comparison to the global average of 81 percent, Brazil shows a clear need for improved deliverability.

With more than 1 in 5 emails or 78 percent never making it to the inbox across Asia Pacific, Australia posts a strong inbox placement rate of 89 percent – with only 6 percent going missing and 5 percent being sent to the junk or spam folders. The email delivery situation in China doesn’t meet the benchmark for the rest of the APAC region with only 58 percent of permissioned email sent actually reaching the recipient. Largely, 39 percent of email is missing due to being blocked at the ISP level and only 3 percent is delivered to the spam or junk folders.

The report also looks at B2B issues and the impact that new filtering applications have on inbox placement:

B2B Concerns
Reaching business addresses continues to be difficult as inboxes are protected by systems like Postini, Symantec and MessageLabs. Only 80 percent of email is delivered to the inbox through these enterprise systems. While this is a 5-percent improvement from 2009 when just 75.2 percent made it to the inbox, the multiple company-level filtering methods used for business addresses mean that deliverability is still a major concern.

Impact of New Inbox Technologies
In addition to conducting the Global Email Deliverability Benchmark Report, Return Path analyzed a panel sample of 30,000 Gmail mailboxes from July 1, 2011 through August 10, 2011. Eighty-one percent of Gmail mailboxes measured have priority inbox enabled, with the percentage of adoption steadily increasing during the analysis period. For all mail observed during that time, average inbox placement was 91 percent, with 9 percent marked as spam. Average placement of messages in the priority inbox out of those that went to the inbox was 17 percent.

From a best practice point of view, marketers with much focused segmentation, strict data hygiene and strong content strategy have not seen any dramatic shift in their campaign response due to these new inbox developments. By carving out message streams that are highly relevant to their subscriber base, they’ve developed a loyal following.

“What marketers don’t know about their deliverability leaves their businesses vulnerable and decreases the amount of revenue they can generate from their email channel,” says Matt Blumberg, CEO of Return Path. “Only 81 percent of global email reaches the inbox. We can move the needle significantly higher by understanding where email goes and why, and taking responsibility for where it lands. Having access to relevant deliverability data, taking deliverability failures seriously and continuing to implement best practices is crucial for marketers to improve their programs’ effectiveness.”

How to Kill Your Email Reputation

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 16:05:00 GMT

Email is one of those technologies and marketing strategies that if you "do it right" the first time, you will receive the many benefits the communication channel provides. If deployed hastily and without awareness of how certain elements impact reputation (and ultimately profit), email marketing effectivness will most definitely suffer.

Email certification and reputation monitoring company Return Path released findings today from its "Sender Reputation Report: Key Factors that Impact Email Deliverability" and the report reveals that complaints, unknown users and spam traps are blocking up to 36% of all email.

“If you have a million addresses and 20% of your emails are blocked, you are missing 200,000 messages every time you hit ‘send,’” said George Bilbrey, President of Return Path. “This means lost revenue, poor customer experience, increased customer service costs, lost branding opportunities and the inability to advance your message to your marketplace. By understanding the impact email reputation has on email programs, marketers can take immediate and corrective action to ensure higher inbox placement rates.”

Return Path confirmed three critical factors that ISP (Internet Service Providers, e.g. Comcast) and other large-volume mail receivers (Yahoo! Mail or Gmail) use in determing whether or not to block emails - reputation, infrastructure and complaints.

Return Path reviewed this data by Sender Score, its proprietary reputation rank, which is calculated by aggregating reputation performance data from a variety of ISPs, spam filtering and security companies.

Specific findings of note from the study include:

- IPs with Sender Scores of between 41-50 have an IPR of 64% which means 36% of their email is blocked or diverted to a junk folder. IPs with Sender Scores in the mid-range between 51-70 already show considerably higher average IPRs with 71% (Sender Score 51-60) and 76% (Sender Score 61-70) respectively.

- Return Path’s research finds that IPs with a Sender Score range of 90-100 are 42% more likely to pass DKIM versus IPs with Sender Scores of 70 to 79.

Email to Non-Responsive Recipients Endangers Deliverability

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 14:00:00 GMT

A new study from Return Path indicates that only 12.5% take steps to re-engage with lapsed subscribers.

A majority of the email marketers studied sent email at a steady, high frequency for a 19-month period, despite a lack of response from the subscriber (no opens, no clicks, no purchases). 11 of 40 online retailers studied (27%) stopped sending email to non-responsive subscribers but 10 of the companies stopped sending email without making any attempt to reengage the customer or specifically asking the customer whether or not they’d like to continue receiving emails.

“We were certainly surprised to see how these e-retailers were sending emails to a customer who was completely non-responsive,” said Stephanie Colleton, Director of Professional Services, Return Path. “We strongly recommend that email marketers, not just e-retailers, monitor their subscriber responses – opens, click-throughs and conversions – and adapt their campaigns to either slow down the emails to once per month or send a re-permission email to determine subscribers’ continued interest in receiving emails.”

The lesson is clear according to Return Path: when high-volume email marketers or publishers continue to send emails to non-responsive subscribers they risk endangering their overall email deliverability. When non-responsive subscribers receive a steady stream of emails, or in some cases an increased frequency of emails, they will often begin reporting those emails as spam driving up the marketer’s complaint rate.

Only five of the companies (12.5%) studied actually sent one or more win-back messages – messages designed to reengage subscribers and ultimately drive additional purchases. Bed, Bath & Beyond had the most complete email win-back strategy of the e-retailers studied. They identified the inactive subscribers in their file, decreased the frequency of emails to those subscribers over time (from seven emails per month down to a few more than five per month, and eventually to less than one). After one year of inactivity, they sent a clear, attractive win-back message with a discount offer for an item of the subscriber’s choosing. A week after that win-back campaign, they sent a re-permission email specifying a date when they would stop sending email unless they received subscriber permission. When they received no response to the re-permission email, they honored their commitment and stopped sending.

Email Delivery Imperatives - ReturnPath Guide

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 17:29:00 GMT

Email deliverability company Return Path released a guide outlining some best practices for email senders. According to the Email Delivery Imperatives, email senders should be prepared to implement email authentication (specifically DKIM), apply for email whitelists and focus on developer user engagement metrics by ISP.

“Almost 95% of email messages at one point in 2009 were classified as spam, according to a recent study,” said George Bilbrey, President, Return Path. “As ISPs battle the onslaught of spam, the risks increase that legitimate senders’ will find their emails mislabeled as spam or junk and not reach consumers’ inboxes. After talking with ISPs about trends for 2010, we identified three key strategies senders should focus on to help ISPs properly identify their mail and ensure delivery to the inbox.”

Let’s review Return Path’s recommendations:

Implement email authentication – DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) is a security standard that allows ISPs to verify the IP address that sent an email. Google, AOL, and Yahoo! currently use DKIM as one email verification measure but Yahoo! also requires DKIM for access to their feedback loop.

Apply for email whitelists – Whitelists allow ISPs to identify legitimate emails and give increased functionality to trusted senders. For example, Return Path’s Certification Program automatically enables links and images for emails sent to Hotmail.

Prepare for an increased focus on engagement metrics – ISPs are increasingly developing engagement metrics to find legitimate emails. For example, Yahoo! is tracking the time an email stays in users inboxes before it is deleted. ISPs will develop a variety of engagement metrics in 2010 to identify legitimate email, including tracking messages that users find in their junk or spam folders and mark as “not spam.”