Goodmail: OK Guys, Free Ride’s Over

Ending what surely must be one of the longest mass free trials in business-to-business marketing history, Goodmail is set to begin charging for its services in 2009, according to company representatives.

The firm also hit a major milestone in September when—according to David Atlas, Goodmail’s senior vice president of worldwide sales and marketing—3.1 billion commercial e-mails were sent carrying the company’s certified e-mail stamp.

This is an increase of 30 times over September 2007 when 100 million e-mails were sent stamped as non-spam by Goodmail’s Certified Email service, said Atlas.

“Basically, Goodmail hit 3 billion in September and decided to start charging,” he added. “We’ll always do a 60-day free trial, but the long-term free trial is winding up.”

The company first announced a 90-day free trial of its service—where companies that meet certain permission-e-mail marketing criteria such as low spam complaint rates can pay a fee to guarantee their messages get delivered with graphics and links intact—in July 2006.

Then in a hail-Mary effort to gain traction, the firm in August 2007 announced a deal with three of the largest e-mail service providers—CheetahMail, Acxiom Digital and Epsilon—to offer its service free to their clients through the end of this year.

Other ESPs offering Goodmail’s Certified Email service to clients include Responsys, Zeta Interactive, ExactTarget and Silverpop, said Atlas.

The free trial was part of a multi-pronged effort to ramp up the volume for the company which, due to at least one major marketing misstep, had failed to gain traction in the marketplace.

Along with the free trial, Goodmail last year embarked on an effort to form better relationships with ESPs, many of whose representatives had been grumbling that the company was sidestepping them by selling its service directly to their clients—a service that would have to be integrated with the ESPs’ technologies.

“We did business with the senders directly not taking into account the realities of the relationships that exist at these ESPs,” Atlas said at the time.

Many e-mail marketers look to their service providers for tactical advice. Goodmail executives realized that if it stood a chance of gaining any real traction, it had to have the ESPs on its side.

“When a sender outsources its e-mail marketing program, it’s not outsourcing its sending of mail,” said Atlas in 2007. “They’re outsourcing their strategic thinking about their marketing. Goodmail recognizes that in order to work with senders we have to have a working relationship with ESPs … and deals in place that put these ESPs in a position to be able to roll this out to clients.”

But even with the ESPs finally on board, there was the question of whether Certified Email would deliver a return on investment that made the program worthwhile to marketers so they would ultimately agree to pay for the service.

According to Atlas, marketers in the Certified Email program—where messages appear in people’s inboxes with a blue-ribbon certification symbol next to the “from” line—have seen lifts in open and click rates of between 20% and 30%.

The reason for the boost in open rates is clear. Most e-mail inbox providers block graphics and disable links in incoming e-mails to protect their users from unwanted pornographic images and malicious software that is often behind the links spammers send.

An “open” is recorded when the receiving computer calls for mages from the sending machine.

As inbox providers began increasingly shutting images off during the last several years, marketers began seeing their open rates plummet to the point where it became a near useless metric.

For marketers using Certified Email, the open rate may be a useful metric again.

Atlas also said that with constant pressure from clients on ESPs to drop their pricing, Goodmail’s service has given them a premium service that makes it easier for ESPs to keep their pricing up.

“Goodmail as a premium offers ESPs some flexibility,” he said.