Email Stamps: Can Small Business Play, Too?

Posted by Laura Bergells

February 7, 2006

This week, Seth Godin blogs about the efficacy of paying for stamps to send email….and I agree wholeheartedly!

And I bless one of my small business customers, who called this afternoon to say, “Get me hooked up. I want to pay someone for stamps to send out weekly emails to my list of 2,000+ subscribers. Find out who that someone is, and pay them to validate and certify my email. Let me know what it costs, and bill me.”

This business sends out a weekly email newsletter to a small subscriber base…from their own server. They manage their own double opt-in list that they built from scratch. Their messages are well received by their subscribers.

So why would my client want to pay for email stamps?

Because by paying, he’s sending a message…on top of his email message! He’s saying: my message is very valuable. And I’ll pay to certify that it gets in front of my subscribers. In fact, I want to ensure that it does.

Unfortunately, I haven’t found a service that wants his business. You see, he’s a small business. Services like goodmail.com will gladly take his $199 qualification fee, but will also eliminate him from playing, because he’s not Coke, Pepsi, or American Express. Services like Goodmail want to put messages into the hands of big business, and leave small business voices silenced.

If you’re a small business, you’ve probably had problems getting your messages to clients who use AOL…my client often has to phone AOL subscribers and walk them through “How to Add Us to Your AOL Goodlist”…so you can understand why he’d be eager to pay to be automatically included in AOL’s goodlist. But thanks to services like goodmail, its “Charter Program will be limited to brands that are well regarded by most consumers or small businesses.”

So…as long as you’re big business that has spent millions in branding, your messages can get through to people. And you can also make sure that your small business competition is silenced…for mere fractions of a penny.

Isn’t that ironic? The internet promises to be a medium that lets so many small voices be heard and read…until it gets into the hands of big business. Now that AOL and Yahoo! are big businesses… only the voice of big business can get through to their subscribers.

And that’s not a good, open internet communication policy. I’d be all for an email stamp program if small business and individuals are allowed to pay to play, too. It’s also a good reason to dump AOL as your ISP. And it’s an even better reason for small business to provide blog and rss feeds for their subscriber bases.

So…..anybody know of an email certification for small business program that will get through to AOL, Yahoo!, et. al. ???

Because I’ve got a customer for them…..