I’ve been called a lot of things in my life, but never “The Mailman”. When I hear that term I think of two things, first the guy that drives the little white truck and delivers the vast numbers of print catalogs to my house and second, I think of NBA great Karl Malone, known as “The Mailman” as he always delivered. In this case, however, the term “The Mailman” is being applied to me in a different context.

I am fortunate to have been selected by CRM magazine as one of their Influential Leaders of 2008, for the work that I and the team at Habeas have been doing to help save email. The title of their piece on me is “The Mailman”, thus the title of this post. I am truly honored to accept this prestigious award on behalf of the entire team (past and present) at Habeas.  The article praises Habeas for being thought leaders in the drive to educate marketers and email senders about best practices in email through such initiatives as ReputationWiki.org and our participation in industry forums likes AOTA as well as our work with our valued partners such as Lashback, BoxSentry, Campaigner, Summit Projects and many others. We’ve made it part of our mission statement to “save email” and a huge part of that is market education to email senders about differentiating themselves from spammers by adopting best practices in email (e.g., obtain recipient consent, relevant email, prompt unsubscribe, etc.).

This award comes at a very interesting time in my life and the company’s history. As I write this post I’m also multi-tasking by completing the very last byzantine details on the Habeas-Return Path merger. So, yes, Habeas and I are being recognized as industry leaders in email reputation management and delivery simultaneously with the company merging into Return Path. 

I admit the timing has a bit of irony, but in the big picture I think this award from CRM magazine is further validation of a few key things that drove the merger:

First, over the last several years email has made a strong resurgence as a marketing communications medium.  Both consumers and businesses love and prefer the medium above any other for their interactions.  I’ve written about our consumer research with Ipsos and Erick Mott has written about our business research with the EIU's "Digital Company 2013" initiative which supports this assertion.

Second, evangelism of best practices among email marketers is a huge part of what today’s email ecosystem needs. Organizations like eec, AOTA, MAAWG, and others are playing a big role in sender education. But many email sending organizations need more than a list of best practices – they need the rigor, analysis, process evaluation, consulting and performance monitoring provided by email deliverability and reputation service providers like Habeas and Return Path.

Third, email has become critical as a business to consumer communications medium across most verticals in the U.S. (retail, travel, automotive, etc.) and Europe and increasingly in the huge market of Asia as well.

We at Habeas are very proud of this award and I am very proud to be associated with the merged Habeas and Return Path. As of August 22, 2008, Return Path has the team to take the mission, saving email, and the company to the next level – evangelizing best practices to senders across industries globally, enabling consumers to have a better inbox experience and supporting the continued healthy growth of the email industry directly and through an extended network of receiver partners.  It’s going to be great to see email’s continued growth in the next couple of years – the Return Path team will continue to work hard to make sure the (legitimate) mail is delivered!


A special thanks to every Habeas employee since Day 1 (alphabetical order):

Tracy Amador, Bradley Anderson, Jeffrey Anderson, Joshua Barrack, Kristine Beebe, David Bernard, Robert Biala, Michael Bierman, Srinivas Bolisetty, Jessica Bowe, Keith Brown, Chris Brubaker, Jennifer Bumb, Michael Cabbell, Des Cahill, Eloise Carlton, Richard Castello, Carlo Catajan, Denise Cattan, Faith Combs, Joe Cordoni, Monica Coriz, Nicole Curutchet, Rajat Dutta, Larry Ellis, Ray Everett-Church, Kristin Fawns, Jennifer Fery, Mandy Fu, Michael Garcia, Liz Gegenwarth, Carl Gutenkunst, Sharon Haahr, Virginia Hammrich, Cynthia Herrera, Matt Herrera, Shawn Higginbotham, Tifaine Highly, Bill Hunt, Franz Hurtado, Anthony Igwe, Parul Ihde, Courtney Kerns, Carolyn Keyes, Charlie Kim, Jon Kingsting, Bryan Klech, Mike Klein, Sudhir Krishnan, Aleisha Lang, Brett Lemoine, Deborah Leyvas, Ky Lim, Quintin Litten, Steve Lozoya, Nigel Marrion, Michelle Marsh, Art Martinez, Alisa Matsuzaki, Sarah Matthews, Mike Mills, Anne Mitchell, James Moore, Erick Mott, Dharmendra Naik, Tara Natanson, Satish Natarajan, James Navin, William Nicholas, Donald Nordloff, Elaine Orgain, Scott Orgish, Farzana Patel, Manisha Phadke, Stefan Pollard, Beatrice Poulsen, Erin Raby, Venkatraman Ramamurthy, Catherine Ramos, Lianne Reynolds, Goody Riley, Michael Rosenberg, Ramie Salameh, Carol Sarracino, Theodor Schricker, Aparna Seetharaman, Nicholas Shackelford, Roshan Sharma, Charles Skinner, Philip Smith, Josh Stivers, JF Sullivan, Chuck Swenberg, Alfiya Tamayeva, Tom Taylor, Jaysree Thakore,  Mark Tognoli, Qarin Van Brink, Xuyen Vuong, Douglas Warren, Brady Wilkes, Huiwen Wu, Kalyan Wunnava and Chris Zutler

In many cases in life, more is better. The title of this blog refers to the classic Saturday Night Live skit “More Cowbell” starring Will Ferrell and Christopher Walken.  This classic skit  is a hilarious illustration of the concept that more is better.  In the skit, Blue Oyster Cult is in the recording studio laying down tracks for their soon to be mega-hit “Don’t Fear the Reaper” under the supervision of gold record winning producer Bruce Dickinson (yes, “the” Bruce Dickinson) played by Christopher Walken. Will Ferrell plays BOC’s percussionist and on this track he’s playing the cowbell with enough fury and persistence to drive his fellow band members absolutely nuts. Despite the band members’ protests, Bruce Dickinson insists, throughout the skit, on getting more cowbell on the track, “fellas, I’m telling ya, you’re gonna wanna have that cowbell.”  You really have to see the video to appreciate the humor.

So why all this More Cowbell stuff in this blog post? Well, Habeas and Return Path are merging together and the big question I expect customers, partners and industry colleagues to ask me is “Des, why are you selling Habeas to Return Path?”  No, the answer isn’t “More Cowbell”, it’s that the combination of the two companies provides more resources to enable the common mission statement of the companies (i.e., “saving email”) to be better addressed on a global basis. These “more resources” will bring benefits to senders, receivers, consumers and the email community.

Email deliverability/reputation companies are by their nature trusted third parties that provide services to both email senders as well as to email receivers. That means that resources for product development, marketing, sales and business development and customer services have to be engaged with two completely different sides of the market. On both the sender side (e.g., direct senders, email service providers, MTA vendors) and receiver side (e.g., ISPs, message security companies, MTA vendors) there are multiple market sub-segments with varying needs to be served. And increasingly at Habeas we have seen domestic and international customers with mailing lists have a significant cross-border component, requiring expansion of our services into Europe and Asia. Long story short, email remains vital to our customers which has been helping our business grow at a healthy rate, but our management team has seen for some time that the business opportunity is a global one requiring more resources across the company to best serve our sender and receiver customers.

In 2003 I had been at Habeas for a few months, trying to figure out what the business might really be, when Matt Blumberg and George Bilbrey from Return Path came to visit. They were interested in purchasing Habeas (which was 4 people at the time) and our flagship offering, Sender Warranted Email, to add a whitelisting service to Return Path’s existing deliverability tools and consulting services business. I liked George and Matt and their knowledge of email market. While that deal didn’t come to fruition, their interest in Habeas helped me further understand the value in the business and inspired us to grow it further. Here we are five years later with over 400 clients and 45 employees and now the deal to combine the companies is coming to fruition.

Honestly this acquisition of Habeas is something that I have mixed emotions about. Chuck Swenberg and I have invested five years of hard work in building this business with a goal of creating an independent, stand-alone company. We have an incredible staff of talented people who care deeply about our mission statement to save email.  A lot of hard work has gone into selling and servicing our customers. The Habeas SafeList is used by leading ISPs and a million email networks globally. We’ve created innovative reputation technologies. The easy path would be to continue the business as is with its 60% year over year growth for the last few years. But, strategically, to continue to improve our services for our customers and partners and to grow our footprint globally, in the words of Bruce Dickinson, “You gotta have more cowbell.” Or to put it another way, the business opportunity to save email is a large one and will be best served by the combined company that will have the resources to address it globally for senders, receivers and consumers.

So, I am very pleased that this time we *have* reached an agreement with Return Path as this is the perfect home for the Habeas business and team.  First, Return Path recognizes talent and they are retaining essentially all of the Habeas team on a permanent or on a transitional basis. Second, as we’ve gotten to know each other, we discovered that we have similar values in our company cultures which emphasize both our employees and customer service. Third, based on five years of competing with Return Path and working with the management team in various industry forums, I know that Habeas’ customers and partners will be in great hands with this executive team. Fourth, Habeas innovation will live on. In working on this transaction both companies have learned a lot from each other and the Return Path team is keeping not only the SafeList, but will be integrating other Habeas technologies and business processes into their existing platform and business model over time. Fifth, the combination of the two companies creates the undisputed global leader in email delivery and reputation with the critical mass of employees, customers and partners to actually save email – which is what Habeas and Return Path are all about.

There is plenty of work to do over the coming months to integrate the companies. And we’ll do that in a way that allows us to continue to serve our customers and partners, and to soon offer them more and improved services. I’ll be actively be helping with the integration efforts for the next several months, helping the combined company come together and then I’ll step back and watch it grow over the coming years. Email is too important not to be saved. Read more about the acquisition via these FAQs and Matt Blumberg's blog post.

The Internet is an incredibly powerful and empowering medium.  It’s changed our lives in countless ways that we take for granted. Instead of going down to Tower Records to buy that new record (yes, I am that old) I can download the album instantly. Rather than wonder when that package will show up, I just go to FedEx’s website and track the delivery process. If I need a 2.5mm to 3.5mm jack to make my old noise cancelling headphones work with my iPhone, I don’t have to find a RadioShack and deal with the guy with the pocket protector anymore. I can Google and find a bunch of vendors who sell that obscure part (long tail anybody?). Those are a few small examples of how the Internet has changed things in my life and there are many, many others.

The top three empowering aspects of the Internet’s development in the last 15 years or so has been the emergence of the Web itself, web directories and search, and web-based, free email services. I’d like to talk a little bit about the latter in this post, the empowerment of consumers from the mass adoption of email in their personal lives.

Habeas, the world leader in online reputation management services, periodically fields a study with our research partner Ipsos to understand consumer attitudes and usage patterns for email and the Web. We have just started publishing the results from our May 2008 study and we found some encouraging and interesting things in the results. The study interviewed over 3,000 U.S. and Canadian Internet users and the panel was constructed so as to accurately represent overall North American Internet user demographics. Here’s what we learned:

1.  Consumers love email

Net: Personal email use is ubiquitous in penetration and increasing in frequency among North American consumers. We prefer to communicate with businesses via email versus other mediums and don’t expect that to change in the next 5 years.

2.  Consumers are increasingly concerned about online crime and therefore selective about who they do business with online

69% of Internet users say they are concerned about becoming a victim of online fraud via email.

When asked how to distinguish fraudulent and legitimate email – the leading method was that the consumer had asked for the email and received emails from them previously.

Consumers are also using multiple personal email boxes, over 61% had 2 or more, which they are using to segregate trusted email from less trusted email.

Net: For email senders, it’s no longer about getting into the inbox – it’s about building a trusted relationship with consumers who have empowered themselves with multiple free webmail accounts – and getting into the consumer’s trusted inbox.

3. There are steps that senders can take to build trust with Consumers

Consumers were quite clear about what makes them trust a sender – and what makes them not trust a sender.

Net: Consumers want control. They are empowered by the Internet (see introductory paragraph) and expect that empowerment to extend to their email experiences. Consumers want to give you their permission to receive email. Consumers want email weekly, not daily. Ideally, consumers want control over the frequency and content of their email. And do not share their email address with others.  Consider how to install a preference center for your subscribers. Think about how to segment your list so your campaigns deliver the most relevant content possible to your customers.

So what’s the takeaway – build a great online reputation through adoption of best practices in email. You’ll get two wonderful benefits, both improved email delivery rates to the inbox and the trust of your subscribers. If you can accomplish the latter – you’ll have a great competitive advantage – you will have established an ongoing dialogue with your customers and prospects in the Internet’s leading medium today and into the future.