The price of Spam

If you are in the Web business, then most likely you must have designed an HTML email at some point in your career. A few years back, it was the rave to send out Web pages in an email. It made marketing a product so much easier.

Now, 2006 is here and with it some of the toughest spam filters to defeat. I, for one, recommend text only emails to all my clients. The ROI on these is far better than any HTML email I have send in the past year. Out of a list of 30K, I will be lucky if 1K make it and 300 actually get opened. With text only emails, I get a 45% delivery rate and 5 to 6 % open rate, that's 3 to 4 percent better than the national average.

Well, if you still insist in sending out HTML emails, yahoo and AOL just made your day. Today the companies announce a partnership with Goodmail which will certify your email and make sure that it gets deliver to the intended recipient provided that they opt-in to your list. The price a fraction of a penny per email address. Is it worth the price?

The bottom line is that with text only emails you are guaranteed a better delivery and open rate, so why bother, if you really want to show HTML, make a landing page and make it the first line of your text only emails. You are surely to get better delivery and the fraction of the penny, well, multiply a half a penny times 30k, and you are looking at over 150 dollars. This is a small blast considering most companies blast to quantities in the hundreds of thousands, you do the math.