On Friday, WhatCounts hosted a webinar for our customers and friends.  The presenters were Charles Stiles (Postmaster for AOL), Michelle Eichner (Vice President of Client Services for deliverability service provider Pivotal Veracity) and John Ouren (Senior Vice President of Sales and Business Development for Goodmail Systems).  The moderator was Justin Foster (Founder of the Email Marketing Roundtable).

Together, they described the current and future landscape of email deliverability and they explained the details of the CertifiedEmail program that AOL and Yahoo will be providing, using the Goodmail Systems technology.  I should mention that WhatCounts is officially a Goodmail partner...our message transfer agent upgrade allows our customers to choose whether or not they would like to participate in the CertifiedEmail program.  If your email service provider is not yet a Goodmail partner, you may want to ask them to upgrade their message transfer agents for you. 

Some interesting points were raised by all three presenters.  Here are some notes I took:

- As we all know, malicious email behavior is always on the rise.  AOL continues to be the most effective spam-blocker among ISP's, and it maintains the highest inbox deliverability results at the same time

- Last month, Pivotal Veracity published an informative fact and fiction message that explains exactly what AOL is doing and not doing with their Whitelist programs.  Michelle also has a great PowerPoint slide with a chart that throroughly describes five possible AOL service levels for marketers:  not being on the Whitelist, simply being in the recipient's address book, being on the Standard Whitelist, earning your way to the Enhanced Whitelist and participating in the Goodmail CertifiedEmail program

- The recipient is still in the driver's seat, regardless of which programs a marketer participates in.  If the receipient wants to add someone to his/her address book, block a particular sender, enable links and images, etc...he/she is always welcome to do so

- The CertifiedEmail program hopes to lift marketing results from 57% value (due to delivery and image/link-blocking limitations) to 120% value (by increasing delivery, functionality and open-rates).  Of course, if you are already working with an effective email service provider, you should be starting at a level much higher than 57% (or it's certainly time to switch services!)

- Goodmail will not require its customers to place CertifiedEmail tokens in every outgoing message.  Marketers will be encouraged to maintain a control group of tokenless messages which will allow them to properly test the effectiveness of the program against KPI's such as open-rate, click-through rate, average order size, revenue per email, etc.

- The exact pricing for the service was clearly explained, and it's much lower than the urban myths you're probably reading on the Internet.  I'll let them describe the model to you first-hand, but it's basically lower than the fee that you're currently paying your email service provider (unless you're a high-volume sender).

Anyway, just working to dispell some of the myths that are out there.  I'm sure there will be more to come.