E-mail Postage—YESSSS!

March 2006 By Denny Hatch

multipage

On the day of my visit to the Postini Web site (2/28/06), I found the following statistics:

• 10 out of every 12 e-mails are Spam (83.3%)

• One in every 105 Spam messages contains a virus

• TOTAL SPAM IN PAST 24 HOURS
  
  Spam Messages: 137,790,756
  
  Bulk Mail: 97.7%
  
  Special Offers: 0.7%
  
  Get Rich Quick: 0.3%
  
  Sexually Explicit: 1.2%

• TOTAL SPAM IN LAST 30 Days: 3.68 billion, 23.9 terabytes

• TOTAL SPAM IN LAST 6 months: 19.8 billion, 126.8 terabytes

Prior to acquiring a BlackBerry—enabling her to access her office computer from any place in the civilized world—my wife, Peggy, publisher of the Target Marketing Group, would come in from one of her many road trips and be forced to deal with more than 500 e-mails. Of those, at least 400 were spam junk unsolicited, useless, utter crap.

Peggy probably spends two hours a week dealing with spam. That’s 100 hours a year, or more than two working weeks. Eliminate spam, and Peggy’s company has gained an extra two weeks of Peggy’s productivity. That’s big bucks.

The Need for Financial Restraint on Marketers

In 1995, when I was editor of Target Marketing, I got into a conversation with Seattle marketing guru Bob Hacker on the subject of direct mail arithmetic.

“It’s easy,” Hacker said. “You can do it on a cocktail napkin.”

“Could you show my readers how to do it on a cocktail napkin?” I asked.

“Sure,” Hacker replied. Two days later, he produced my August cover story, “COCKTAIL NAPKIN ARITHMETIC: And other hands-on techniques to guarantee you profitable direct mail.”

Until Internet marketing, precise attention to numbers—and the purity of mailings lists—were essential elements of direct mail marketing ever since this form of advertising was first used on June 15, 1194, the week Chartres Cathedral burned to the ground and Bishop Regnault de Moucon started writing fundraising letters to rebuild it.

When spending $500/M on a mailing or 50 cents a package and half your list is out-of date, resulting in 50 percent nixies (undeliverables), the true cost of the mailing is really $1000/M or a buck apiece. In most cases, this would be unacceptable, and you would lose your shirt.

With the advent of the Internet, where millions of messages can be sent out for virtually nothing, it’s unnecessary to worry about cost per thousand or even cost per million.

As a result, spammers have no monetary restraints and no incentives to keep lists clean.

The Goodmail-AOL scheme would impose some financial discipline on the spammers. The arithmetic now for a spammer is profitability on four or five orders per 10 million spam messages. A 1 cent per e-mail stamp would mean that spammers who send out 10 million messages would pay $100,000 in postage. Gee, that would certainly crimp their style and make them look at ROI the way legitimate direct marketers do.

I delete drug, stock or sex offers without opening them. Period.

If the druggies, stock manipulators and dirt bags had to pay 1¢ to reach me with their offers and never got a reply or an order, maybe, just maybe, it would make sense to delete my name from the list.

Duh.

And how about all our nitwit acquaintances who see or hear a joke and send this silly stuff out to 75 of their nearest and dearest friends? Suddenly the jokesters would have to ask themselves: Is this joke so funny that I can afford 75¢ to send it to all my friends?

Here’s what Goodmail offers with “CertifiedEmail”:

1. Assured delivery. The CertifiedEmail service offers advantages even to those already experiencing excellent delivery. AOL and Yahoo! will deliver CertifiedEmail messages to your customer’s primary inbox. They won’t be blocked, trapped by Spam filters or delivered to a spam folder. Goodmail-accredited senders can expect higher campaign returns, lower support costs and renewed customer trust.

2. Gain full message functionality. CertifiedEmail messages are presented with HTML graphics and links enabled. So a customer sees the message immediately, without having to use a ‘Show Graphics’ feature. Without CertifiedEmail, high delivery rates are often accomplished by altering message content to avoid tripping Spam filters. With CertifiedEmail, your messages won’t go through filters, so you can freely use the messaging style that’s most appropriate for your audience.

3. Inbox labeling. Participating ISPs, including AOL and Yahoo! will prominently display the CertifiedEmail trust symbol in both the inbox list view and the message window to indicate that the message is authentic and from a Goodmail-accredited sender—a measure that increases message safety and enhances your brand. Placement of the icon in the e-mail user interface, rather than in the message itself, helps to ensure that it cannot be spoofed by fraudulent senders.

4. Delivery Confirmation and Enhanced Reporting. A unique token in every message allows Goodmail to track and confirm delivery at the message level. With this feature Goodmail can manage volume, provide accurate delivery and non-delivery reports to senders, and track recipient feedback for fair and straightforward enforcement of the service.

I send perhaps 1,000 e-mails each month. If I were assured that my e-mail arrived with an icon that showed I had paid a penny, it would let the recipient know that the message is from someone who cares. The cost to me? $10 added to my monthly AOL bill. Big deal.

This claptrap from MoveOn and the other liberal weenies who suggest that charities can’t afford the postage is preposterous. Goodmail is offering nonprofit rates.

Let’s say that nonprofit rate is a quarter of a cent per message.

That means a charity could send out 400,000 appeals for $1000. If I were running a non-profit organization and my marketing person sent out 400,000 e-mails and received less than $1000 in contributions, I would fire the idiot. If it happened again, I would question whether I had a viable business model.

Money talks.

And I am sick unto death of the Internet Free Lunch.

Perhaps when I’m drooling in my applesauce in the Medicaid old folks home, I’ll be happy to settle for low-end, free e-mail service.

But for now, three cheers for AOL and Goodmail!

Maybe in the near future I can call Bob Hacker out of retirement and he can come up with “Cocktail Napkin Arithmetic for E-mail Marketers.”

Takeaway Points to Consider

• The 20-something geeks who fueled the Internet explosion in the late 1990s saw the Internet as free to all and advertising driven.

• Because of the Internet’s “Everything Should Be Free” philosophy, consumers and business people have forgotten that their time equals money.

• For example, the Internet deeply hurt the directory business because low and middle management believed they were saving the company money by spending hours on the Internet searching for free information, which they could have found in minutes had they paid for a directory.

• Goodmail announced the new CertifiedEmail system with analytical and rational copy, and people saw it as a money grab. In point of fact, this is a highly charged, emotional issue. In two words, “Spam stinks.” Instead of light gray mousetype copy that reads like a legal brief, Goodmail should have gone for the gut and used the proven copy driversÑthe emotional hot buttons that make people act:
  
  

  -Fear (of being overwhelmed with spam)
  
  -Greed (spending time dealing with spam costs you money)
  
  -Anger (at the profligacy of the spammers)
  
  -Exclusivity (Why drive a Mini-Cooper when you can drive a Jag?)
  
  -Salvation (less spamÑa lot less)
  
  -Flattery (your time is worth money)

• The reason e-mail marketing efforts are so poor is that the practitioners never learned the basics, the rules of direct mail marketing, a canon that goes back 800 years.

• This goes for the writers and designers of the Goodmail Web site.

Web sites Related to Today’s Edition

MoveOn Letter to Members

http://civic.moveon.org/mediaaction/alerts/Stop_AOL_email_scheme.html

Goodmail Systems

http://www.goodmailsystems.com/

Spam Laws: United States

http://www.spamlaws.com/us.shtml

Offshore Internet Hosting

http://www.havenco.com/

Postini Spam Statistics

http://www.postini.com/stats/

Cocktail Napkin Arithmetic

http://www.dennyhatch.com/tons/napkin/