By the way, if you're a marketer who is concerned about any trends that the Goodmail service might initiate, there is an alternative:  RSS.  We had a meeting with a leading online retailer / magazine publisher yesterday who will be implementing an RSS solution for this exact reason.  If you syndicate your messages instead of emailing them, then you get built-in 100% deliverability for free.  That's an even higher guarantee than CertifiedEmail for a lower price.

The common argument against RSS is that "nobody uses it."  A white paper by Yahoo that was published almost six months ago placed RSS awareness at 12% and knowing use of the technology at 4%.  We would expect these numbers to be closer to 15% and 5% right now.  The study also found that "27% of Internet users consume RSS syndicated content on personalized start pages (e.g. My Yahoo!, My MSN, iGoogle) without knowing that RSS is the enabling technology."  The white paper goes on to say that "even tech-savvy 'Aware RSS Users' prefer to access RSS feeds via user-friendly, browser-based experiences (e.g. My Yahoo!, Firefox, My MSN, iGoogle)."  Being a Yahoo publication, it adds one more statistic...that My Yahoo! "has the highest awareness and use of any RSS-enabled product."

So, if you're a marketer, you may read those numbers and say "with RSS-reader adoption at 5% and start page RSS consumption at 27%, I'm going to just stick to email for now."  You can certainly wait until those numbers increase.  But, aren't you actively ignoring a large percentage of your customer base?  When the Windows Vista operating system with built-in RSS features in Outlook and Internet Explorer 7.0 is released later this year, are you going to still be totally unprepared for RSS?

Seems like an interesting strategy to knowingly ignore your most tech-savvy market.  Sure, RSS is still rough around the edges.  But, the adoption of this technology could be doubled by simply getting marketers on-board.  Internet Retailer published an article in January about how online retailers are using RSS.  When is your company going to adopt it?