The Postage Bill
The big topic in online marketing this week is the announcment that AOL will be using Goodmail to "vet" email and handle it differently that the standard bulk email, which has to run a gauntlet of spam filters to get delivered. Senders will pay between a quarter-cent and a cent for the Goodmail service.
Reaction from online marketers has been unsurprising; who wants to pay more for anything? MarketingVox reports of Return Path's reaction to the news: it will hurt legitimate marketers.
Yes, it will. A little bit. It is, however, still a good idea. (If marketers had the ability to kipnap consumers, force they eyeballs open, and make them watch commercials for an hour a day, it would be helpful. Taking that privilege away would hurt. It would still be a good idea.)
Seth Godin gets it. Spam is caused by the warped economics of email, where the illusion that it's free to send messages makes ROI so easy to achieve that there's a huge incentive to abuse the medium.
This is unsustainable. First of all, ISPs are not going to pay the significant costs of infrastructure (mail servers, storage, bandwidth) to deliver spam. When you're the size of AOL, those costs are enormous. That's why we've got the current spam filtering system, where marketers have to accept that a certain portion of messages, no matter how carefully we've crafted our opt-in policies and created relevant content and cleaned our databases, are just never getting to the recipient who asked for them.
Second, consumers don't want spam, and the more spam there is, the harder it is for real marketers to use email successfully. If you're a legitimate marketer, spam is bad for you.
Personally, I'd prefer paying a small fee to know a message is getting delivered over playing an endless game of spam filter roulette and hoping people are getting what I'm sending.
Yes, the cost of email is going up. A bit. The message for marketers is simple: make sure that your email is good, relevant stuff with a compelling ROI that won't be wrecked by a penny extra delivery cost. If your payback is that thin, go back and rethink your programs.
Consumers don't want spam, and companies like AOL are responding to that. You can complain about it, or you can deal with the reality - and succeed in a changing environment. Your choice.
Reaction from online marketers has been unsurprising; who wants to pay more for anything? MarketingVox reports of Return Path's reaction to the news: it will hurt legitimate marketers.
Yes, it will. A little bit. It is, however, still a good idea. (If marketers had the ability to kipnap consumers, force they eyeballs open, and make them watch commercials for an hour a day, it would be helpful. Taking that privilege away would hurt. It would still be a good idea.)
Seth Godin gets it. Spam is caused by the warped economics of email, where the illusion that it's free to send messages makes ROI so easy to achieve that there's a huge incentive to abuse the medium.
This is unsustainable. First of all, ISPs are not going to pay the significant costs of infrastructure (mail servers, storage, bandwidth) to deliver spam. When you're the size of AOL, those costs are enormous. That's why we've got the current spam filtering system, where marketers have to accept that a certain portion of messages, no matter how carefully we've crafted our opt-in policies and created relevant content and cleaned our databases, are just never getting to the recipient who asked for them.
Second, consumers don't want spam, and the more spam there is, the harder it is for real marketers to use email successfully. If you're a legitimate marketer, spam is bad for you.
Personally, I'd prefer paying a small fee to know a message is getting delivered over playing an endless game of spam filter roulette and hoping people are getting what I'm sending.
Yes, the cost of email is going up. A bit. The message for marketers is simple: make sure that your email is good, relevant stuff with a compelling ROI that won't be wrecked by a penny extra delivery cost. If your payback is that thin, go back and rethink your programs.
Consumers don't want spam, and companies like AOL are responding to that. You can complain about it, or you can deal with the reality - and succeed in a changing environment. Your choice.
posted by John Whiteside at 2/09/2006 07:56:00 AM
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