Ever since AOL announced last January it was implementing Goodmail’s CertifiedEmail program, marketers had one simple question: Will the resulting lift in revenue make the program worth the cost?
Goodmail last week announced the results of a test in which client Overstock.com determined that Goodmail CertifiedEmail achieved a 19% boost in click-through rates and a 22% boost in revenue per e-mail to AOL addresses.
Though Overstock will not release more specific numbers, Goodmail CEO Richard Gingras said that if Overstock had paid Goodmail’s published price of 0.25 cents per message to have its e-mail guaranteed delivered to AOL addresses with graphics and links intact, the return on investment would have been a triple-digit percentage.
“Their increase in profit per message is a substantial return given a quarter-of-a-cent price per message,” said Gingras. “It’s a multi-hundred percent ROI.”
The Overstock test consisted of five campaigns over four weeks, each sent to about 300,000 people for a total of about 3.5 million messages, according to Goodmail.
Gingras said about 120 marketers are in various stages of getting their e-mail certified by Goodmail.
The tests come at a time when marketers are increasingly finding AOL addresses less enticing as the portal makes irritating moves, such as adding a competing banner ad that cut the e-mail recipient’s viewing area by a third, and increasingly blocking images and links by default unless the mail was certified as safe by Goodmail.
AOL addresses can typically make up 20% of a consumer file. However, historically AOL addresses have responded at 60% to 70% of the level of other segments, such as Yahoo addresses, said John Ouren, senior vice president of sales and marketing for Goodmail, citing DoubleClick data.
“AOL addresses without CertifiedEmail on average are less responsive,” he said.
As a result, a Goodmail-generated 19% boost in click rates—like that reportedly experienced by Overstock—would still not bring AOL’s addresses up to par with the rest of an average mailer’s file. However, it might be enough to change marketers’ increasingly negative assessment of AOL’s addresses.
“The learning from looking at the data at Overstock is that they [AOL addresses] are still worth mailing,” said Ouren. “By any stretch of the imagination, if you’re generating 20, 30, 40 cents of revenue per e-mail your sending, they’re worth it.”
One reason AOL addresses have historically underperformed is that the portal has been more aggressive than other Internet service providers on security and spam-filtering issues, said Gingras.
Gingras predicted that as Yahoo! and Microsoft increasingly take steps similar to AOL, such as blocking images by default, marketers will start to see response rates from addresses at Yahoo! and Microsoft plummet.
