Interview with Didier Colombani from Return Path: "Emailing professionals will evolve their practices

On the occasion of the Time2Marketing exhibition, I had the opportunity to talk for more than an hour with Didier Colombani. Didier is Regional Director of Return Path Southern Europe and Benelux for 6 years now, that is to say since the installation of the American company in Europe. Here is the story of the meeting!

Return Path is at the crossroads of many paths in the world of emailing. But they all lead in the direction of deliverability, which remains (and will remain) its core business.

To simplify, the company is in relationship with three types of actors:

• Email operators and filtering solution providers
• The sending platforms (routers)
• Advertisers

The deliverability specialist offers email operators (both ISPs and webmails as well as appliances) various scoring, classification and filtering services in exchange for data flows that will then be used to offer deliverability analysis services to sending platforms and advertisers. But Return PathReturn Path is also an emailing preview service, reputation measurement, engagement measurement, and many other things. Return Path acts as a trusted third party between these different stakeholders.

On the whole range of its services, there is no competitor on the horizon except possibly on some niches!

According to Didier Colombani, Return Path has more than 120 partners in Europe (routers or digital agencies). But beware, becoming a Return Path partner does not mean forming a lifelong relationship! Indeed, the company wishes to ally itself with partners who share the same vision, the same desire to educate the market and offer complementary services.

A company in development

While historically Return Path had chosen to work strictly with routers in Europe, the company now works directly with advertisers and thus standardizes its commercial strategy at the global level. Advertisers are increasingly confronted with complex deliverability issues and realize that it is up to them to make decisions!

While the Scandinavian, German and English markets are relatively mature and willing to address deliverability issues, the southern European markets, such as Italy and Spain, still present great development opportunities for Return Path.

A vision of the emailing market

For Didier Colombani, emailing will continue to consolidate strongly in the coming years. American solutions are likely to take over at the international level. The future looks very complicated for local players who are themselves forced to try their luck outside their home countries and to enrich their solutions and service offers more and more in order to meet the market's evolutions and expectations.

Very few deliverability experts in Europe

According to Didier Colombani, there is a real shortage of talent and real deliverability experts. In Europe, Didier Colombani estimates that there are no more than 10 deliverability experts with highly specialized skills in this field.

To solve this talent shortage, Return Path relies mainly on internal training to develop its experts. For the technical teams, they are mainly technicians with very strong knowledge in network, authentication, routing, ... On the other hand, for the account managers, the recruitment favors profiles with a successful experience in email marketing for an advertiser.

How educated is the market?

For Didier Colombani, there are very different dynamics among advertisers.

On the one hand, some of them are very advanced on deliverability and emailing issues and are ready to take risks to make their practices evolve. The others are more reactive and will only adapt when the new practices are confirmed ... at the risk of missing the train.

Unfortunately, even with a lot of good will, most advertisers have no vision of the rules that govern deliverability.

For all that, Didier Colombani says he is very :

"Confident in the ability of email marketing professionals and advertisers to evolve their practices in their own interest."