b2b blocking
B2B email deliverability is different than B2C. It’s more of a wild west, providers are more numerous; while Microsoft and Google do host mail for bajillions of B2B domains, overall there are so many more B2B mailbox providers, all hosting smaller pieces of the corporate email pie; with nowhere near the same level of consolidation seen in the B2C/DTC email realm.More than that, there are two things unique to the B2B marketing space:Cold leads / unsolicited marketing mail, aka spam, is much more prevalent in the B2B realm. I get B2B spam, you get B2B spam, we probably all get B2B spam, and that can make people assume that it’s an accepted practice – though it’s really not – and that it works well – even though it I’m not sure it does. (And if you want to argue otherwise, let me remind you that there are too many apples.)Email
Let’s compare B2C versus B2B deliverability issues, shall we?In the B2C (business-to-consumer) or DTC (direct-to-consumer) email marketing universe, the number of mailbox providers, while broad, is very heavily concentrated in the US. There are six providers, that when you add up their subscriber reach, they comprise over 90% of almost any typical US B2C email list: Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Comcast and Apple. Anything beyond the top five is pretty much in the long tail. (That doesn’t mean you ignore deliverability issues for smaller providers, but when you do a cost/benefit analysis of time investment versus reward, it is often clear that fixing an issue with a big provider first will yield more benefit.)In the US B2B (business to business) email universe, things are not as obviously concentrated. There are more providers and it’s not just a set of six controlling just about all of the mailboxes you’ll want to send mail