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Here are some more comments from around the web on AOL and Yahoo’s partnership with Goodmail.
Bill Flitter at Pheedo calls it a Nail in the Email Marketing Coffin and links to more posts on the subject.
Anne Holland of MarketingSherpa says, Ok, Now I’m Finally In Love With RSS (How the New Email Postage Movement Changed My Mind)
Two excellent thoughts from Rok Hrastnik at MarketingStudies, Are Goodmail and AOL Trying to Limit E-mail Marketing to Corporations and US Business?
Plus E-mail Postage and the Rise of RSS Marketing … Or the Death of E-mail Marketing and What You Can Do.
The latter also links to some more must-read articles you need to read and act on as soon as possible.
As Rok is saying and, as I have been saying for a couple of years too, “Getting a strong RSS marketing program in action is now becoming more important than ever”.
But, don’t give up on email entirely. Both have their place.
Think of it this way. If the only email you are likely to get delivered free in future is to people who have trusted you enough to go to all the trouble of ensuring that they get it (whitelisting, giving a non-filtered address, etc.), then you need a means to build that trust with them beforehand.
And, proving an RSS feed of what they consider useful content is the way you can begin building that relationship.
In Paying for E-Mails One-by-One, Dr. Ralph Wilson questions Goodmail’s allegation that whitelisting isn’t scalable. Yeah, so do I actually.
The problem for me is not that someone has to pay (in money) for whitelisting. No third-party whitelist should really exist. Nobody except the recipient himself has any possible way of knowing what is and what isn’t wanted email.
Thus, if you want to be whitelisted at the recipient end, you have to earn that right, by providing useful content.
You have to get the recipient to want what you have enough to come to you: pull, rather than push.
Finally, Rich Ord, CEO of iEntry says, Goodmail Is About Money … Not Spam, in which he asserts that, “The only companies who could afford to pay the Goodmail fee are the larger emailers which ISP’s already identify as non-spammers.” Obvious really, isn’t it?
Discrediting the discreditors
Not in a vengeful way, but some education is needed:
The most worrying aspect of this is that legitimate email whose senders have not paid Goodmail’s ransom are more likely to end up in the spam box, as Ord says, “Subscribers will likely be confused by this which could damage the credibility of an email publisher and its advertisers.”
In that, I think we all have to educate subscribers more on the fact that filtering is about money not spam and, that the filters are neither fair, nor accurate. Because, whilst that may be apparent to those of us who work with email, end consumers may not have considered the matter - either from the business point of view, nor that of technology’s limitations - and will take things at their face value.
The wording we have used to date, “you subscribed to this”, etc., just doesn’t cut it in my mind. Any spammer can use that vocabulary. It also hinders, rather than helps you get through filters. We need to be creative.
Having thought around circles on this, over and over, I keep coming back to the conclusion that providing something of quality that subscribers want (an entirely “moveable feast” that will always have elements of “beauty being in the eye of the beholder”) and being known and trusted by the recipient are the ONLY ways to achieve it.
Written by Pamela Heywood - Visit Website | Leave a tip | Buy me something
