Will Email Become a Paid Marketing Channel?

Who should listen: The implications of what our guest reveals are so incredible that everyone who interacts with email should listen.

Key idea: The goal is to give email recipients a defense against the bad behavior of marketers.

Action item: Before sending your next email, ask yourself how confident you are that it will produce the desired result and whether you’re willing to pay $3 for every delivery to the inboxes on your list.

Many of us probably wish to receive fewer emails, especially from people and companies we don’t know. Unwanted emails feel intrusive and, while spam filters help, they aren’t the final solution. Even having to delete them feels like an intrusion and theft of our time. Wouldn’t it be great if these emails just passed you by?

Be careful what you wish for.

Sure, it would be great if you stopped receiving emails that have no relevance for you, but if you’re a business that uses email marketing (and what business doesn’t?), it soon could be your emails that are deemed irrelevant.

Email marketers may need to pay to play

Andy Mowat, this week’s Stay Paid guest, had reached a point where he no longer wanted to tolerate email marketers sending him poorly written, irrelevant, self-serving email campaigns.

Rather than continue to click the Delete key, Andy founded Gated, a company whose mission is to give email recipients a defense against marketers whose purpose is to push as many emails across as many servers and into as many inboxes as possible.

His idea is genius.

As you listen to his interview, you’ll hear about how the service (which is free to users) helps to keep your inbox pristine, but, essentially, it presents unknown senders with a choice. They can either donate a minimum amount of money to a charity selected by the recipient and have their email delivered or choose not to donate and have their email never make it past Andy’s gate.

The best defense is a good offense

Andy’s vision and hope is that if email marketers need to pay for each delivered email, then they’ll be forced to think whether their email is sufficiently good and that, eventually, marketers will be forced to ensure that:

• Lists are segmented appropriately.
• Information is relevant.
• Campaigns are crafted to include clear, well-written messages.
• It’s easy to comply with CTAs.

But it’s not all doom and gloom for marketers. Andy sees large-scale benefits from the arrangement because, overall, the noise of the competitive landscape will be reduced. Instead of sending 100 emails and receiving only 2 replies, Andy sees marketers sending only 10 emails and receiving 5 replies.

If Andy’s service experiences widespread use, the consequences for email marketing and its practitioners will be game-changing.

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Connect | Resources

Website: www.gated.com

Book: Predictable Revenue: Turn Your Business Into a Sales Machine with the $100 Million Best Practices of Salesforce.com

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