Today is a very big day – both for Validity – and for leading brands that rely on email as a mission critical platform for engaging with customers.
What’s the news? Today Validity announced that we’re acquiring Return Path, the global leader in email deliverability. Most digital marketers are familiar with the Return Path brand, but in case it’s new to you, I’ll give a brief summary.
Return Path offers a suite of cloud-based products that ensure email campaign optimization and message deliverability. The Return Path platform brings together the world’s most comprehensive sources of data from the email ecosystem, covering a jaw-dropping 3.5 billion inboxes—approximately 70 percent of the world’s inboxes.
Who uses Return Path? Leading brands in retail, hospitality, media, internet, banking, education and the non-profit sector all rely on email as a primary form of communication with consumers and customers. In fact, 7 of the top 10 retailers (by sales) are Return Path customers, and 165 of the top ESPs are Return Path channel partners or customers.
What we particularly love about the work that Return Path has been doing for the last 20 years  is the trust they’ve established with the leading Internet and Email Service Providers around the globe, and for the thousands of customers who have embraced Return Path as a must-have solution for digital marketing success.
When we talk with sales and marketing professionals evaluating our solutions, we hear time and time again a desire for higher fidelity interaction with customers. They are seeking a greater trust that the effort they’re making will result in an effective digital marketing campaign. When we looked at Return Path, we could see the incredible service they’ve provided for nearly two decades and it was a great fit within the Validity vision and our brand promise. As Validity continues to welcome leading brands that help customers with key data challenges, we’re thrilled to welcome Return Path into the Validity family.
About a year ago, we acquired BriteVerify, the go-to platform for verifying email addresses and email lists. BriteVerify helps leading marketers boost the impact of their marketing campaigns. And earlier this year we launched Trust Assessments, an all-new software product which reveals to sales and marketing professionals what impact the quality of their Salesforce data has on their business. The product reveals how trustworthy your CRM data is and what actionable steps you can take for improvement. Combine these core concepts – data that’s valid, verified, and trustworthy – with Return Path’s Sender Score and Certification offerings, and now we have a holistic view on not just a single known element of CRM data – but all of it.
From there, customers can use Return Path to gain rich analytics that make their digital campaigns run flawlessly. What was the placement of that email within the recipient’s mailbox and did the recipient interact with it? If so, how? And how does that interaction, compared to other competitive campaigns, help our customers gain actionable intelligence? The sky’s the limit.
By bringing all this together – products like DemandTools and Trust Assessments for CRM, BriteVerify for email verification and now Return Path –  we’re able to provide a one-stop shop experience for Chief Marketing Officers or sales executives and operational teams at tens of thousands of companies worldwide to get a holistic view of how they’re doing with their data.
This combination is a win-win for our expanded commercial footprint as well. Validity has long been a strong global company and now further increases our global presence with the expansion of our North American and London offices and additional offices in Australia, Brazil, and other locations.
In the coming weeks, we will be unveiling new packages that bring together our different offerings in a more unified way, so our customers can enjoy more capabilities. For Return Path customers who for years have been enjoying these email deliverability services, we’re excited to be able to provide them a host of other offerings that can ensure improved overall marketing campaigns by now increasing the data integrity of the broader CRM experience. Further, we love that the rest of the Validity customers will now benefit from the greatness of Certification and broader analytics around the email data field and digital marketing campaigns.
Since welcoming the BriteVerify family into the Validity family we have had a strong focus on email as a critical piece of our Trust Platform. A natural stepping stone to further that initial investment with BriteVerify was Return Path.  With this combination, Validity is the dominant global leader in email, and we can’t imagine a company better positioned to help you with your email needs than Validity.
This is an exciting time for Validity, our customers, and our partners as we continue to push boundaries and innovate. We have an enviable leading position in the data quality space. With the addition of Return Path, we are evolving the future of email in a broader conversation around trust and certainty. Please join me in welcoming the Return Path community into the Validity family and stay tuned as we have additional exciting announcements planned in the weeks ahead!
-M