A Week in The Life of Certified Email

David Daniels | February 10, 2006, 01:47 PM

The first week of the idea that we will be living with certified email is under our respective belts. While it will still be a little while before we see this operation, today caps a week of controversy much of it was to do with the manner in which AOL communicated this. It is good to see that Ted Leonsis has at least acknowledged that AOL could have communicated this better in his recent blog post. However reading the follow-on posts there indicates that there still may be some confusion about this offering within the ranks of AOL.

My colleague Pamela Parker at Clickz does a good job summarizing the weeks events as well as contemplating the longer term implications in her recent article Beyond Deliverability.

As mentioned in my previous posts, marketers concerned with their transactional email getting delivered or those that are interested in pushing more snail mail into the email channel should look at the certified mail first. It provides an immediate value proposition for those mission critical messages. At the same time everyone needs to calm down and remember a few things.

1. It is not mandatory. Think of this like adding a return receipt at the post office, it is an additional layer security for the ISPs, it is additive for them and for the marketer it improves their confidence that the mail got to its destination.
2. The early focus is on transactional email. I spoke with Yahoo! earlier this week and they made it clear that their test will be limited to transactional email and that its version of Goodmail will be based on Domain Keys and ultimately DKIM.
3. All of this talk of more expense should make us all as marketers take a hard look at the value of the email channel, the value of an email address and the typical value of an individual mailing. Certified mail is all about optimization and if you don’t yet have a good handle on those value oriented KPI’s then you should first identify them to determine if this program will make sense for you.
4. Test and measure the impact of certified mail. As with everything, testing will help you to determine if there is enough lift and value to make this additional expense worthwhile.

In any event it will be interesting to continue to watch this debate evolve in the coming weeks and months.