Return On Subscriber – Email Marketing Blog

Sorry for the pathetic week of posts last week, I am back with a vengeance this week. Consider yourselves warned.

So I was thinking, with Google’s recent acquisitions of Feedburner and Postini, what is stopping Google from targeting an ESP next?

There has been some debate around the office as to why Google would want to enter the ESP space. I say, more ads, obviously. My only thought as to why they wouldn’t is their motto, “Don’t be evil.” What ESP hasn’t been considered evil by someone daily. We get people reporting their double opt-in message as spam for example.

I think Google has a real opportunity to go after small businesses with a basic email marketing service, which would be a great intro to their Apps, which seem to be a very high priority these days. When you look at the market share Constant Contact and Vertical Response are getting with low volume, low need clients, why wouldn’t they swoop in, like they did with Analytics?

Maybe the brains at Google can figure out how to make sure their users have a clean, 100% opted-in list, and help them get 75% read rates, 50% click rates, and deliver 99% inbox?