Hopefully you have heard that Return Path has acquired email and social media organizing company OtherInbox founded by Josh Baer.
For those who don’t know what other OtherInbox is, they are a online service that allows you to organize all your emails and social media communications such as shipping information and payment reminders into categories or folders without any software to install or filters to configure. Email marketers love OtherInbox because it helps them send targeted, relevant emails that generate more revenue. Consumers and users of their system like myself love OtherInbox because it tends to saves time and gives control over the Inbox.
I personally see thousands of email emails per day. Everything from corporate, to personal, to purchase orders, confirmations of all sorts, shipping notices, bills, and the list goes on and on. In the past I like you have always captured all those into one inbox creating an unmanageable clutter that can sometimes take hours to sift through. Using OtherInbox has saved me time because the service knows what categories of email I am receiving and as such folders them automatically and correctly based on the class of email they match. When all I said and done, I have one folder with just shipping notices in them. Those are important to me, but not right this second I also don’t want them to be cluttering my inbox. My corporate bonus email from the company is very important to me and as such I want that one to be staring at me in the face all day long.
What should be of interest to you is the bigger picture Return Path will now have when it comes to measuring relevancy, deliverability, and how users are interacting to your email. Yesterday we as an industry only had a “30,000” foot view of our users interaction with email in general. In the past we could have “some” certainty in knowing what our users are doing with email today. With this acquisition we will now have a “10,000” foot view into how people treat our email especially when it comes down to the classification of email they are interacting with.
With this merger, Return Path is now expanding its already extensive tool sets of telling you everything from how an email passed or not passed a spam filter, HTML issues in your content, what your sending reputation is, if your infrastructure is correctly set-up, etc. to now knowing more details about the user base. Return Path for all intensive purposes is now expanding their email certification and scoring programs from just the traditional email classifications of transactional and marketing to a more detailed, comprehensive, and truer set of classifications like shipping notices and E-bills that we know today is required as we continued to preach relevancy and targeting for success. This partnership will also gain a more detail measurement of the use of digital communications not just based complaints and hard bounces, but how people tend to treat email within their mail clients.
I’m excited to see this partnership for both companies as it will continue to improve the digital communication space for all involved. Information sharing of this nature is important and both companies have similar goals in mind to ensure that the space will continue thrive for all.
You read more about it from Return Path’s PR release here.
-Dennis
Eloqua
Don’t Just Send, Deliver!
Last 5 posts by Dennis Dayman
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