DMers Losing Interest in AOL Addresses

If AOL wants legitimate marketers to avoid contacting its subscribers, the plan is starting to work.

E-mailers are preparing for a serious drop in performance of AOL addresses, and some have abandoned mailing to them altogether.

The banner ads AOL recently began inserting at the bottom of paid subscribers' e-mail have cut the viewing area by a third, making the addresses even less enticing to mailers than they already were.

Moreover, the attention-diverting banners now compete with whatever is in the message — usually a series of broken links and graphics — because AOL 9.0 now blocks HTML.

Not surprisingly, some subscribers are up in arms about this move. At the same time, some marketing consultants are counseling their clients to consider suppressing AOL addresses, which can make up 20% of a consumer file.

“AOL is creating an environment where people don't want to send e-mail to their users, which could be the goal. But I don't think it will thwart the really bad spammers,” said Jay Schwedelson, corporate vice president of list management and brokerage firm Worldata.

Schwedelson added: “Everyone expects to start seeing a drop in response rates from AOL addresses, and the more legitimate marketers are going to take their efforts elsewhere.”

Besides the new banners, AOL's practice of blocking HTML graphics makes the AOL names even less enticing, he continued.

“I have a lot of clients saying, ‘I just don't want the hassle. Let's not send to AOL addresses.’” A lot of marketers don't find AOL addresses to be their best responders anyway.”

Bill Moore, vice president of marketing for home-brewing and wine-making supplies marketer William's Brewing, said AOL routinely blocks his company's e-mail newsletter, so he simply suppresses those addresses.

“We just don't mail to them anymore,” he said.

Another reason marketers are upset with AOL is that their messages may appear with a banner from a direct competitor below it, said Stefanie Pont, managing partner of marketing consultancy Pont Media Direct. “If you've got a mortgage offer going out this morning and it's directly over LowerMyBills.com, what's your recourse?” she asked.

As of last week, Pont was e-mailing her clients screen shots of an AOL account with the banner included to help them decide what to do. If nothing else, the banners bring new creative challenges, she said.

“In some cases, the first live link to click on is now below the fold,” she said.

Pont added that the new banners may hurt interest in Goodmail's CertifiedEmail service, where marketers can pay to have their e-mail guaranteed to be delivered to AOL addresses with graphics and links intact.

“Why am I going to pay extra so that you can deliver e-mail that no one's going to look at?” she said.

However, Steve Webster, chief strategist for e-mail service provider iPost, said AOL's irritating changes to paid subscribers' e-mail accounts may all be part of the plan.

“AOL is trying to pull its bacon from the fire as it's slowly being lowered in by the loss of subscribers,” he said. “If you're an AOL executive, the market forces that are pushing your subscribers away from you are irreversible. You can't stop the spread of broadband, and you can't compete with the phone companies, so what do you do? You give up the paid Internet access business that's been your bread and butter for so long.”

AOL probably is gunning for market share in the portal business dominated by Google and Yahoo! by driving consumers — and their eyeballs — to its free service, according to Webster.

“It seems to me that AOL is consciously forcing its paying customers to get upset and move to the free version of AOL — AIM.com — before they lose them altogether,” Webster said. “The one piece of real value that subscribers still get from AOL is that address they paid for for 10 years, [and the way for subscribers to keep their old addresses is to move to the free service].”