Many online marketers at corporations across America are up in arms about a proposal by Yahoo, AOL, and other major email suppliers to provide a certified email service through Goodmail Systems, at a fee of about $0.0025 per piece. Corporations and non-profits will be able to use the system to ensure that their mail actually gets through to clients inboxes. As an email marketer, should you be worried about this move towards an email tax?

As an overall marketer, I cant think of a better value than email, and not because its free. Its an intimate connection point with customers, where measuring results, responses and successes are easy and nearly-immediate. At the price point of 0.25 cents an email, with my lists getting an average of 48 emails a year, the proposed system would cost 12 cents an address per year. Obviously, this piece rate is astoundingly low (compare it to direct mail or telemarketing with an equal number of points of contact). The only people this rate would impact on are spammers who send out such a high volume of email that the cost would be prohibitive. As ethical marketers, our return on investment per address should be far higher than that of the spam shops.

It would be incredibly beneficial to the email marketing industry if this plan became universal. User-level volume could easily be appended to the cost of internet service providers, while corporations and marketers could factor it into the piece rate. One of the limiting factors of email marketing is that users are simply deluged with information, and having an associated cost would reduce the number of useless spam emails, increasing the time a user has to read your message.

Now, some of you out there are probably shaking your heads at the thought of an increased price being a good thing. You may not have the same level of success with your campaigns, and be concerned that the fee will drive into the profitability of your efforts. It may be time to retune your message, or offering. Better yet, remove those addresses that arent selling! Its a hard thing to do, but culling your email list is an essential activity to your ongoing success, and ultimately it will increase your effectiveness. After all, why check the effects of changes for users who never act, or worse, read your message?

Spam wont be going away anytime soon, but measures like adding an email use fee or captcha math problems will reduce its impact. Currently, email marketers can employ a blast-first and look-later approach. A charge on email would result in marketers needing to be more selective and effective in their list building and messaging. I treat my email lists like they cost a dollar per address, which mentally makes me spend more time in building to and selecting my audience, resulting in a better message to the client, and a better bottom line.