Goodmail Strikes Free-Trial Deal with CheetahMail, Epsilon, Acxiom Digital

The elusive Goodmail CertifiedEmail symbol may soon be a common sight in people’s e-mail boxes as a result of a series of high-profile deals the company has just struck.

In its most aggressive promotion yet, Goodmail has signed agreements with three of the largest e-mail service providers—CheetahMail, Epsilon and Acxiom Digital—to offer its program free to qualified e-mailers through the end of 2008.

The goal of the promotion is simple: volume. Among Goodmail’s challenges has been getting marketers to adopt the scheme and making consumers aware of the CertifiedEmail symbol’s meaning—that the e-mails carrying it in inboxes provided by Yahoo, AOL and other ISPs have been certified as non-spam, authentic and safe to open.

Making the symbol a more common sight in people’s inboxes would go a long way toward raising consumer awareness.

At the same time, Goodmail is clearly hoping marketers will get enough of a lift in campaign performance from CertifiedEmail’s benefits—a guarantee their e-mail will be delivered with graphics on and links enabled—that they’ll be happy to pay for CertifiedEmail when 2008 ends.

“As a result of this program, the volume of [CertifiedEmail] messages goes from 100 million messages a month to 2 billion messages a month,” said David Atlas, vice president of marketing for Goodmail. “We’re talking about an increase of 20 times on the volume of CertifiedEmail.”

Atlas said each of the e-mail service providers participating in the promotion has agreed to hit certain unspecified volumes, but it is up to them how to achieve their goals.

Mailers must meet Goodmail’s certification standards to qualify for the promotion.

Ashley Johnston, spokeswoman for CheetahMail, declined to get into contract specifics. “The important thing is if our clients want to try Goodmail CertifiedEmail, they can try it,” she said. “If they don’t want to they don’t have to. It will not be turned on by default.”

This is not the first time Goodmail has announced an aggressive promotion aimed at boosting the use of its CertifiedEmail program.

The company offered a 90-day free trial of its system last year. It offered a 300% return-on-investment guarantee in April.

Although Goodmail claims more than 300 mailers send CertifiedEmail, executives at various e-mail service providers have said that most marketers have taken a wait-and-see approach to the product.

Matt Seeley, president of CheetahMail’s parent, Experian Digital, said he had no idea how many of his clients will take advantage of Goodmail’s latest offer.

“They’re all direct marketers; they’re going to take a look at it and see if it has any value,” he said. “We looked at the deal that Goodmail was offering us and we decided it’s in the best interest of our customers. I think they understand that we have a rather large, quality client base.”

CheetahMail claims it has more than 380 big-brand clients in the U.S. and 200 in the U.K.

The other ESPs in the deal aren’t making any predictions over how it will pan out, either.

“We’re now in a position to offer our clients the ability to explore, risk free, the impact and ROI of assured inbox delivery, special labeling and the bypassing of default image suppression,” said Ragy Thomas, president and chief technology officer, Epsilon’s Interactive Services group, in an e-mailed statement to Magilla Marketing. “We’re especially interested to study the effects of CertifiedEmail within vertical markets and as relates to different types of messaging.”

Kevin Johnson, president of Acxiom Digital, said he expects many of his clients will try Goodmail’s free offer. The question is whether any lift they see will be worth Goodmail’s regular price of a fraction of a penny per e-mail.

“It’s sort of a no-brainer that there will be a lift,” he said. “The question is how much they will be willing to pay for that.”