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Sarah Novotny is the Sr. Editor in Charge of Adotas. Sarah grew up in San Jose, California. Her educational and professional career have taken her to both Los Angeles and New York City where she received a B.F.A. from NYU. As a writer, Sarah has free-lanced for various publications focusing primarily on traditional advertising and media reviews. When not writing and editing for Adotas, Sarah is continuing her acting career in various theatrical and film/television productions.

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Spotlight

Goodmail: Video-in-Email the Next Goldmine

Written on
July 15th 2008
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ADOTAS: You mention that video-in-email is the “next big thing” in direct and interactive advertising. Do you have statistics that could support this projection?

COHEN: The past few years have seen significant spending and budgetary shifts by corporate marketing departments that favor direct/database and online channels over traditional, mass vehicles like print and television.

According to IDC’s digital media and entertainment report, corporate marketing is shifting from traditional (TV, print, direct mail) to online (banners, search, email, online video). Additionally, the Kelsey Group predicts that local online video ad revenue will increase from $10.9 million in 2007 to $1.5 billion by the end of 2012, a compound annual growth rate of 167.8 percent.

In my mind, email is sitting in the sweet-spot of this trend. It is a true hybrid; the only marketing vehicle that is equally direct and interactive in nature. The only thing holding the channel back for advertisers is its limited ability to support interesting creative.

But once email is capable of supporting things like video, I expect the paradigm will change. Advertisers will take another look at the channel and start to take it a lot more seriously. Why? Because it will turn out to be the most effective tool they have to distribute highly-personalized rich media and video content directly to individuals that they know a lot about and who have actually requested to receive it.

ADOTAS: What types of businesses would benefit the most from investing in this type of advertising?

COHEN: The obvious examples are media companies and publishers who’d be interested in sending existing and original video content to users, essentially turning the inbox into a media player. Offering valuable content will drive that holy grail of email marketing – list growth – for these companies while simultaneously boosting customer engagement, open and click-through rates. These factors would substantially increase the value of their lists and the inventory they sell within their email newsletters.

There are plenty of other use-cases too. Retailers can use video to enliven product offers with live demonstrations and editorial reviews. Travel sites can include video tours of the destinations and resorts they’re promoting. Even CPG companies can use video to sell soap, rendering a person just like you washing his or her face and feeling refreshed. The possibilities are endless.

ADOTAS: How do people opt-in to emails sent through Goodmail?

COHEN: People receive CertifiedEmail when the companies they do business with use the solution. We have strict accreditation standards, and CertifiedEmail senders must adhere to an Acceptable Use Policy that requires the consent of recipients before sending them email. Marketers are prohibited from using CertifiedEmail to send prospecting messages to addresses from lists acquired through third parties.

ADOTAS: How are Goodmail’s services better than its competitors and how are they weaker? What sets you apart?

COHEN: When it comes to email authentication, accreditation and reputation solutions, Goodmail really stands apart from the competition in many ways. CertifiedEmail is a separate class of email; messages are individually marked with unique secure tokens that identify each as safe and trustworthy, which provides a lot of benefits.

CertifiedEmail is the only solution that actually enables accredited senders to bypass spam filters entirely with guaranteed inbox delivery. Other solutions can only help improve a sender’s chances of making it through as their messages are routed along the standard filtering process.

CertifiedEmail is the only solution that provides ISPs the safety guarantee they need to fully render a senders’ links and images while simultaneously displaying a blue ribbon envelope icon in the browser assuring users that messages are safe.

CertifiedEmail senders see substantial lifts in email marketing performance, including open and click-through rates, and business metrics such as lifts in sales, lifts in value-per-customer, etc.

ADOTAS: Recently, there have been several news reports that email marketers have had issues with all of their messages being received. How does Goodmail ensure that the emails sent are received in their inboxes?

COHEN: Deliverability remains as challenging as ever. And as long as there are bad people in the world who have access to computers, there will be spam, phishing and viruses. It’s a war of attrition and an arms-race, and ISPs will continue to constantly refine their spam filters and other security tools in an effort to combat the latest spammer tactics. Unfortunately, a side effect will always be that email that people actually want will always stand a chance of getting blocked or sent to junk folders if sent through the normal filtering process.

Goodmail solves this problem for its senders through the system I explained earlier. Essentially, we’ve created a private fast lane that marketers can use to know for certain that their messages will and have reached their intended recipients.

But this private port-of-entry we’ve created isn’t for everyone. You need to get your TSA clearance first. Only senders that adhere to best practices and have very low complaint rates are eligible to send CertifiedEmail, which they can sign up to use through the dozens of authorized email service provider (ESP) and mail transfer agent (MTA) Goodmail partners. (Complete list is available here.)

ADOTAS: How did the AOTA Summit go and what were some of the major things accomplished?

COHEN: I’ve been very active with AOTA since the beginning, and it’s been gratifying to see the organization come together and be so successful. This was the fourth annual summit, and this year the agenda was expanded to include discussion of a much broader spectrum of threats to online trust beyond just what’s going on in the email channel.

Big name speakers like Craigslist founder Craig Newmark and former FTC Commissioner Mozelle Thompson discussed everything from emerging scams taking place on the social web, to the privacy implications of behavioral targeting technologies.

Over the course of three days, we helped get the word out on the contemporary online security threats that any marketer with brand equity needs to know about and address, and real-life case studies were highlighted to guide brand marketers and IT specialists in the implementation of email and online trust enhancement best practices.

ADOTAS: What are the biggest misconceptions about email marketing?

I actually think that progress has been made over the years in getting the word out that not all email marketing is spam. People sign up for email newsletters all the time and genuinely enjoy getting discounts and other types of information sent to their inboxes. I think that most people get that.

The misconceptions I’m more worried about are the ones that still go on in corporate marketing departments – the misconceptions that belittle the channel’s power and relegate email marketing to the bottom of the budget pool.

Customers’ email addresses are gold; with them, marketers have an opportunity to build profitable relationships and targeted communication-streams that can last a lifetime. These are customers who have opted-in to receive your email and for whom you probably have detailed personal background and preference information on. The channel deserves a lot more attention and respect.



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