MarketingSherpa Blog

Thanks to everyone who asked about the Gmail invitations I was giving away. They’re gone, and so far Gmail hasn’t come through with any new ones. The waiting list is up to 12 now.

I didn’t think I had any ulterior motives when I offered up my addresses to EmailSherpa readers, but maybe I did. That’s because I got some great conversations going with readers who haven’t previously sent in comments.

So, let’s keep it going. Every MarketingSherpa article announcement includes a feedback address you can use to send in your comments, your complaints, raves, rants, etc. What’s going on in your company? What’s working? What’s not? What’s your thorniest email problem? What company are you eager to read about?

I’d really like to hear from someone besides my beleagured friends in Nigeria and Ghana, who have all this money they need me to smuggle into the country for them.

Just hung up from long phone interviews with Michael Mayor, president of the new NetCreations division of Return Path, and Return Path CEO Matt Blumberg about the NetCreations acquisition.

Some details:

1. Return Path had been talking about buying NetCreations for about a year before the company went on the market.

The company, which built its business first on eCOA services, then added deliverability and email-marketing consulting services when it bought Assurance Systems and Gas Pedal Consulting in 2003, wanted NetCreations for its list management, customer acquisition and research divisions.

Why an acquisition and not a spin-off and return to independent status for NetCreations? Mayor said he and his management team considered several possibilities but said the sale to Return Path was “the best one for the company. It keeps NetCreations intact and helps us provide more services for our clients and partners.”

2. Return Path paid an undisclosed amount of cash for NetCreations, using its own money and venture capital provided from companies that have invested in email concerns before.

3. Mayor and Blumberg said no layoffs are planned as the two companies consolidate operations, although some back-end operations such as accounting and HR could be affected. Instead, they said, both are hiring because they anticipate attracting more business to the expanded firm.

4. About the only thing missing now under Return Path’s umbrella now is actual list hosting. Blumberg said the company’s not shopping for an email broadcaster right now.

“The email delivery space is very crowded and very well covered by the companies we do a lot of business with.” Blumberg said.

5. Cross-promotion and data integration are two of the top items on the to-do list. Blumberg said

“We’re looking at a lot of innovation,” Blumberg said. “We’re getting ideas from our customers about getting into new email data-oriented services, and we have a lot of ideas about different things customers have asked us for. We have a pretty good idea of the need out there for helping companies build their lists and enhance their lists.”

We don’t know the terms yet (money, deal structure, etc.) but we were just told Return Path has acquired list-management powerhouse NetCreations from Consodata, a unit of Italian directory publisher Seat PG.

“NetCreations isn’t in touble at all,” we are told. “The bottom line is that NetCreations is a healthy company with great market opportunity and strong revenue that (previous owner) Seat PG wanted to unload to focus on its directory business. This is a win-win for both sets of employees, shareholders and partners, as well as for all clients.”

Seat PG, an Italian directory publisher, bought NetCreations in 2001 after bidding successfully over DoubleClick. Acxiom recently acquired other Consodata operating units.

NetCreations CEO Michael Mayor will join Return Path’s board of directors. NetCreations will become a division of Return Path (name: “NetCreations, a Return Path company”) with Mayor as president.

NetCreations is the home of PostMasterDirect, one of the biggest email list managers, as well as Survey Direct for email sampling, ITProsDirect and NetCreations Technology Services.

Some numbers resulting from the deal:

— 1,500 clients, 500 data partners, more than 1,000 channel
partners and 41 million consumers

— 70 employees in New York and Boulder, Co. offices (no word on consolidation or potential layoffs)

More as we learn it!

Fact #1: Gmail is still officially in test mode, but Google just doubled the number of invitations a tester can send at a time — six now, instead of three.

Fact #2: Some people, including the WSJ’s Tim Hanrahan and Jason Fry, are delighting that Gmail invitations don’t have the same ‘cool’ factor, not to mention cash value, they used to because they’re not as rare as they were. Another sign that Gmail is in a soft rollout, soft enough not to violate Google’s quiet period before its IPO but active enough to build up a good database of names before it launches.

Fact #3: It’s taking Gmail’s tech staff longer to reply to complaints. Two weeks ago, an answer to a thorny problem arrived in 12 hours. Now, Gmail is taking even longer than Yahoo! to send a tech response, and it’s just about as useful.

We posted a problem a MarketingSherpa reader was having using a Gmail invitation we sent her on June 21. The answer came 1 week and 4 hours later, with no reference to my specific complaint but with an apology for the delayed response and an explanation: “Gmail is experiencing rapid growth. We have been working hard to keep pace with the popularity of our service while we respond to each individual message. Thank you for your patience.”

The user inbox still shows the “beta” tag along with the Gmail logo, but as far as we’re concerned, Gmail’s here.

Take a moment to find out exactly how many Gmail addresses are in your database now. A few weeks ago, probably none. Today, maybe a few. Tomorrow, who knows?

Nobody’s matching Gmail’s 1GB of storage space yet, but Hotmail and Ask Jeeves just announced they will give their email users lots more space, too, just as Yahoo! did earlier this month.

Microsoft said Wednesday it would raise Hotmail users from 2MB to a relatively dizzying 250MB of space and give its premium users 2GB of space for $19.95 (matching Yahoo!’s move for its premium customers).

Ask Jeeves, which offers email through its My Way, iWon and Excite services, will boost users from 6MB to 125MB.

The extra space means you should see fewer over-quota mailbox bounces in your delivery reports, although if you’re really cynical, it could mean you’ll just ending up sending more email that much longer to abandoned mailboxes.

Ouch. When affiliate management company Linkshare announced their Titanium Awards Winner last week for best performing affiliate of 2003, turns out the winner 24HourEDeals.com, was a cookie-stuffer.

So Linkshare had to rip the tiara off the winner’s head and take back the $15k award.

Cookie stuffing is when an affiliate puts loads (sometimes hundreds) of cookies with their commission codes on an unsuspecting Web surfer’s computer, who happened to click on just one link the affiliate controlled. Then the next time that surfer goes to a merchant’s site of their own accord, the merchant thinks the affiliate sent them. So the merchant pays out a commission for the traffic.

In other affiliate news, Ken Evoy an online merchant who’s famous for encouraging thousands of mom’n’pop affiliates to market his wares extremely aggressively, is upset because he says his own email is being blocked by Brightmail’s filters.

The thing is, Evoy says he personally doesn’t send any non-permission email, so he should not be blocked just because of a few bad apple affiliates who may be. It appears that Brightmail — which is just about the most used filter in the world — may not agree with him.

Last but not least, although Google has not made their planned public announcement that they’ll cease to honor trademarks for AdWords, I learned yesterday that it’s a pretty good bet they’ll do so very soon after their IPO this summer.

So, if you are counting on Google to stop affiliates and competitors from running AdWords ads against your trademarks, watch out.

Got an affiliate program? Perhaps you should have a quick meeting with your team to make sure they are taking active measures to protect you on these three fronts.

UPDATE: Several of you have written in since I posted this article a few hours ago, wanting to know how to detect cookie stuffing. I asked Brian Clark, who as Publisher ReveNews.com is a real expert, for some advice.

Here’s what he says, “Only real ways of detecting it are:

1) watch for affiliates that seem to have an abnormally high click thru quantity but with an abnormally low conversion rate.

2) go to the affiliate’s page with a cleaned out cookie folder, then look and see what cookies have appeared.”

Is your house email list really, really safe? If this happened to AOL, it certainly can happen to you. From a press release sent at 4:42 today:

“Earlier this year, AOL began litigation against a major spammer, and in the process of which, discovered that an AOL employee had stolen member screennames in 2003, which AOL believes were used to send junk email. AOL has uncovered no information indicating that this theft involved member credit card or password information stored by AOL. AOL rapidly brought this information to the attention of federal law enforcement, and this morning the AOL employee was arrested and charged with criminal activity relating to the theft of these screenames.”

Good news keeps coming in for companies who are looking for additional venture-capital funding. NewsStand Inc., which delivers digital copies of major print publications such as USA Today, just nailed down $7.2 million from Adams Capital Management, whose partners include the New York Times, one of NewsStand’s content partners.

NewsStand said it would use the money for “marketing and sales initiatives” to boost worldwide market penetration and to “perfect its digital reading experience through Web and print integration,” President/CEO Kit Webster said.

Visit NewsStand here.

That’s one of the best-practices recommendations the Big Four — AOL, Yahoo!, Microsoft and EarthLink — issued today in a report outlining their best ways to fight spam.

None of the recommendations breaks any new ground for legitimate, ethical bulk emailers, as you can see from this list:

* Do not harvest e-mail addresses through SMTP or other means (defined as collecting e-mail addresses, usually by automated means) without the owners’ affirmative consent.
* Register your e-mail domain with a creditable safelist provider.
* Always provide clear instructions to customers about how to unsubscribe or opt-out of receiving e-mail. Promptly respond to these requests.
* Do not use or send e-mail that contains invalid or forged headers.
* Do not use or send e-mail that contains invalid or nonexistent domain names in the From or Reply-To headers.
* Do not employ any technique to hide or obscure any information that identifies the true origin or the transmission path of bulk e-mail.
* Do not use a third party’s Internet domain name or allow mail to be relayed from or through a third party’s equipment without permission.
* Do not send e-mail that contains false or misleading information in the subject line or in its content.
* Monitor SMTP responses from recipients’ mail servers. Promptly remove all e-mail addresses for which the receiving mail server responds with a 55x SMTP error code (e.g., “user doesn’t exist”).

Each site has a copy of the report and the press release. For brevity, here’s the Yahoo! report. We’ll post the rest shortly.

One good way to promote paid online content is to give a bit of it away in a free ezine. Seybold Seminars, Publications and Consulting, which covers the print publishing industry, is now giving away one whole ezine — the weekly Seybold Bulletin: News and Views on Professional Publishing Tools for print and Web publishers — to promote its other offerings.

“Making the Seybold Bulletin available to the entire Seybold community will make this publication a forum for everyone involved in any publishing discipline,” Cynthia Wood, Seybold Publications editor, said in a press release.

MediaLive International, Seybold’s parent company, also said it has redesigned the 100K-sub ezine, its companion to the bimonthly Seybold Report, and subscribed its paid users to that publication instead.

Check out the newly free ezine here.