B-to-B Marketing Emails Likely to Be Filtered By Mistake

A new study entitled, 'Email Filters & Blacklists in Corporate America: B-to-B Marketing Email Deliverability' features survey answers from 513 executives working at corporations with 500 or more employees concerning their use of whitelists, filters and email list-joining habits. Respondents were asked detailed questions concerning their use of whitelists, company spam filters, junk mail filters, and email receipt at work. The goal - to determine if corporations' use of blacklists and spam filters is stopping 'wanted email' (defined as email the executive has sign up for).

Results revealed that 100% of respondents' IT departments have put filters in place to stop spam from entering the workplace. However, many of these filters place too much reliance on unregulated blacklists and content-based filtering to be able to do a good job of discerning spam email from desired email.

ISPs and online email services such as Hotmail, Yahoo email and Earthlink have enabled users to easily whitelist email from desired senders so mail gets through. However, according to the MarketingSherpa study, only a few corporations allow internal email users to whitelist senders easily. In fact, many executives in corporate America have no idea how to make sure the email they want to receive gets through.

"We've known for three years now that the false positive rate for corporate America is roughly double the rate of consumer email. It's doubly hard for a business-to-business marketer to conduct effective email campaigns. This study begins to point to reasons why, and gives some hope for the future," notes MarketingSherpa President Anne Holland.

The study was published as part of MarketingSherpa's Email Marketing Benchmark Guide.