Would you pay-per-email to get delivered?

There are some updated stories floating on the net regarding Yahoo!'s Centmail: "a charitable twist on the old idea of email postage stamps." where users donate $0.01 to a charity of their choice for each email they send.

Similar schemes like Microsoft's Penny Black or Hashcash have investigated other methods of stamping the email and use CPU cycles to measure the effort of the sender. Since there are about 80,000 seconds in a day, a computational "price" of just ten seconds per message would limit a spamming computer to at most 8,000 messages daily. So spammers would have to invest heavily in hardware in order to send high volumes of spam.

Very recently, during a meeting with one of my French partners, they also asked about Centmail, what my thoughts are on this and if it would be a good investment for them? In todays economic climate (and natural catastrophes happening around the globe), giving more money to charities is a good and noble investment to make... but less profitable. Paying an additional $10 per CPM is a very high price to pay to get your emails delivered.

Personally, I am more in favor to see every email marketing company (or any company for that matter) donate a % of every sell the make to charity - wouldn't that be just fantastic!?

Paying to get delivered - if things were only that easy.
Schemes that are saying "pay us and we'll deliver" sounds like the Godfather Vito Corleone making you an offer you cannot refuse.

It is better to work on the root cause of what blocks your mail from getting delivered and work on your reputation as a sender instead of buying into a false identity.

Your clients deserve this and when you show them "respect", one day they will return you the "favor".

Would you pay-per-email to get delivered?

Google Wave the future of email marketing?

This weekend I spend 1h20 watching the video introduction of Google Wave and I was pretty impressed by what these guys are doing. While I was watching the video I was thinking about what influence this could/would have on direct marketing. If you do not have time to go through the video, let me explain what Google Wave is and what it does:

Google Wave is a new model for communication and collaboration on the web, coming later this year. Here's a preview of just some of the aspects of this new tool.

What is a wave?

A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.

A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

So how could this be used in Email Marketing?
Imagine you own a website and instead of asking visitors to subscribe to your email communications and provide you with their email address, you ask them to become part of your wave that will include offers and promotions.

You would have no more need to:

• send out email campaigns - You simple post your promotions on your website like you normally do and provide everyone access to your wave. Whether they read their waves on their mobile device, blog, social network they can see it everywhere.
  
• manage unsubscribe requests - people that no longer want to receive your communications simply "disconnect" from the wave.
• translate your email campaigns - the video show a great tool that automatically translates the language into the language of the reader.
• Keep an active mailing or "Waving" list - Everyone on the wave REALLY wants to have news from you.
  
• worry about deliverability - because the wave is hosted on a server and everyone reads it directly from the server. No more worries about spam filters, throttling issues, complaints etc...

On top of this, you may be able to analyze exactly how much new Euros or Pounds your promotions are generating because they buy directly from the links in the wave... so from your website.

If all of this is technically possible I guess that this would work if the adoption of Google Wave goes beyond Google's expectations and everyone would be using it and besides, would you provide your personal "chat id name" to just anyone?