• by March 6, 2001

By Adam Bernard According to a recent Jupiter Media Metrix report, in 2005, marketers will send 268 billion email messages, 22 times the number of marketing-related emails sent in the year 2000. This number, combined with personal email, will make for 5.6 billion messages per million subscribers for ISPs and email service providers.

With numbers hitting this high a level, gatekeepers will directly control the routing and inbox presentation of promotional email messages to their users. Basically, marketers will have to pay the gatekeeper if they want to be let in unless users modify their settings to allow the marketers to reach them directly.

This will make for a promotional email delivery tier, which Jupiter predicts will be in effect by 2003. The bottom of the four tiers would be that of bulk delivery. These would be emails sent to special bulk mailboxes, and wouldn't be seen in a users' primary inbox. The next level up would be standard delivery. This would be a strategic partnership, fee-based, or revenue shared, relationship that would get direct delivery to the primary inbox.

The next tier would be that of enhanced delivery. Like standard delivery, enhanced delivery would be either a strategic partnership, or fee-based relationship, but the difference would be that of enhanced fonts and icons, in hopes to increase visibility, and open rates. The top tier in all of this would be that of profiled delivery. Again, this would be a strategic partnership, or fee-based relationship, but profiled delivery would have the added advantage of targeted enhanced delivery, using email profile data to optimize response, and conversion rates, based an a users past behavior.

While at first this may sound horrible, paying to do bulk email, on second thought it may be a good thing. If a little money is spent, or a strategic partnership is formed, open rates should skyrocket. Rather than a user's inbox being inundated with ads, the user will only receive a few relevant ads, and will be more likely to open them if they know the ads are targeted to them.

A potential problem in all of this is that it's possible that some major gatekeepers owned by major corporations (Bluelight.com is owned by K-Mart, etc.) may seek to obstruct the delivery of email messages from competitors. This would lead to new regulatory issues, as most new concepts do.

- Adam Bernard may be reached at adambernard@mediapost.com