Digital + Social

In what is believed to be industry first, Petco Animal Supplies is testing to see if including customer-written product reviews in its outbound e-mail campaigns boosts conversion-to-sale rates.

The Georgia state Senate last week took another step toward helping wipe legal, adult content out of the e-mail marketplace by passing The Georgia Child, Family and School Communications Protection Act.

The bill

Alliance Data Systems Corp. has announced that its Epsilon unit will acquire DoubleClick E-mail solutions for $90 million.

The deal will give Epsilon a stronger presence in the retail, travel, publishing and consumer-packaged-goods markets. It will also give Epsilon 400 more clients, such as J. Crew, Patagonia, Unilever and Proctor & Gamble.

For a company that no one heard of until recently, Goodmail sure was able to stir up the Net Nannies with its announcement that AOL was going to start using its certified e-mail service and charge bulk mailers for guaranteed delivery of their blasts with the graphics and links intact.

With all the empty-headed, alarmist crap that was published last week about the AOL-Goodmail announcement, it was refreshing to run across a thoughtful assessment of the news from permission-marketing guru Seth Godin on his blog:

There has been a lot of buzz in the national media lately about GoodMail’s Certified Email solution. Some are touting it as a solution to the spam problem. The reality from my perspective is that GoodMail is a bad solution.

Richard Gingras says he suddenly knows what it’s like to be a politician or a celebrity. The cofounder/CEO of Goodmail Systems says he’s only trying to help commercial bulk e-mailers attain higher open rates while allowing consumers to once again trust that the e-mails they receive are from the stated recipient.

After an initial outcry over last week

After an initial outcry over last week’s announcement that AOL was implementing Goodmail’s CertifiedEmail program, some prominent e-mail marketing executives have come out in favor of the deal.

AOL announced on Jan. 30 that it was implementing Goodmail’s certified e-mail service. Under the plan, AOL will charge senders a fraction of a cent per e-mail to guarantee that their e-mail will be delivered with graphics and links intact.

While e-mail marketers breathed a sigh of relief last week over the death of an Illinois so-called child protection do-not-e-mail bill, the situation concerning a similar bill proposed in Georgia took a grim turn.