B2B
Six years ago today I wrote here “Spam isn’t going away“, talking about systemic problems at Google, Cloudflare and Amazon and in India. If I were writing it today I might mention Microsoft, Salesforce and ExactTarget as well as Google, and might stress Amazon less (mostly because all the Amazon spam sites tend to be hidden behind Cloudflare, so you don’t know they’re Amazon sites). And OVH, of course. But the gist of the story hasn’t changed in six years, and the conclusion is as valid today as it was then: There will be increasing volumes of B2B spam being sent for the foreseeable future, and there doesn’t seem to be much we can do to change that. If your career involves filtering inbound spam – consumer, smb or enterprise – it seems your skills will be in demand for a long while yet.
Mimecast provides “cloud cybersecurity services for email, data and web,” specializing in cloud-based email management for Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Office 365, including security, archiving, and continuity services to protect business mail. To clients and users, Mimecast may seem like an integrated Microsoft add-on, but from a sender’s perspective, Mimecast is effectively its own mailbox provider. Typical Mimecast customers point their domains’ MX records at Mimecast infrastructure and any inbound mail is rejected or accepted by that infrastructure before being logged, processed, archived (if archiving is enabled), before being forwarded to the actual end user mailbox for the email message’s destination. Mimecast hosts inbound email services for many thousands of email domains. When cross-referenced against the top 10 million domains, Mimecast shows up in the MX record for over 37,000 of those domains. While this is smaller than Google (~800,000) and Microsoft (~727,000), a lot of the entities you’ll see
Sometimes I’ve got big data to share, and sometimes I don’t. Since I don’t have big data today, I thought it would be fun to pause and take a look at a small bit-o-data to see what we all can learn from it. In the graphic above, you can see a breakdown of the top domains and mailbox providers as measured from my tiny little Spam Resource newsletter list. Just under 800 subscribers at the moment. It’s a niche list and different people with different audiences are going to show a different breakdown of domains and providers, but still, I see a lot of the same domains and providers that other folks see. A few notes: I organized the data both by domain and by provider. See how this changes things. I guess my newsletter would pretty much count as a B2B newsletter, as my target audience is email senders
It’s infographic time! This one breaks down the top 25 mailbox providers in the UK, as measured by this methodology:Any domain in the “top 10 million domains” (as measured by various online tools),And that domain name ends in .uk, the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for the United Kingdom,Analyze and roll up counts of all the MX records/email hosting for all of those domains;And thus, we have how many “top 10 million .uk domains” each of these mailbox providers hosts,Which probably makes this breakdown mostly B2B-oriented, and B2C mail tends to be more oriented toward many users at a small number of domains, and very few of these domains are going to be freemail/webmail domains.This ranking by number of domains is not quite the same as noting how much email traffic (or how many messages) each service handles, inbound or outbound, but’s I don’t have access to that, do
Videoconferencing provider Zoom is getting into the email game. Their new Zoom Mail service will allow users to create their own user accounts using the zmail.com domain, but the bigger play is offering custom domain email hosting to paid clients. Surf on over here for more about the Zoom Mail and Calendar Service straight from Zoom themselves, or click on through here to read coverage and analysis of the launch from an industry blog called No Jitter.There are about fifty billion B2B email domain hosting options nowadays, so I’m not entirely sure that the world needs another one. But, add on services and bundles make sense for companies who want more to be able to sell to existing clients, and I do suspect there will be some interest here from the SMB-end of B2B, happy to consolidate a few different services into a single invoice. And honestly, so much mail
Who hosts the most inbound B2B email or mailboxes? I don’t have big data from a large email sending platform nowadays, so it’s not something I could easily answer from subscriber list data. In a perfect world, I’d love to look at thousands of B2B client email lists and analyze them by domain breakdown — and then roll up the domain breakdowns by MX record — to find a clear picture of an average of B2B email hosting provider across that client data.And I did that, once upon a time, where I used to work. When I crunched that data a few years ago, I found a lot of the usual suspects (Google, Microsoft), but I did not see a lot of depth with regard to actual mailbox provider services focused only on the business environment. That made it difficult to broaden the view of the B2B universe beyond the
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
Driving sales in B2B companies is a high-effort and high-reward activity. And lead generation plays the most crucial role in enabling sales. Without qualified leads, your sales team will waste time trying to attract a wider audience that has no real interest in your products and services. You need to identify real leads that actually need what you have to offer and have the ability to buy it too. However, finding such leads is easier said than done. And we’ll explore why in more detail next. If you want to kickstart your B2B lead generation, then this post is for you. Here are powerful ideas that will help you attract leads with real potential. The challenges of B2B lead generation Before we can look at practical steps to capture qualified leads, we need to understand what makes the B2B sales process so much more challenging than B2C sales. Here’s a
When it comes to marketing your business or organization online, planning ahead can often make the difference between a good year and a tough one. And while we all know how important it is to plan ahead, sometimes it can be a struggle to plan for tomorrow when you’re in the thick of today. We want to help. That’s why we’ve created this 2022 online marketing calendar. We’ve even compiled a quick list of 2022 marketing holidays by month, included some helpful links to articles and helpful tips for marketing on those holidays, and provided some additional information on how to use the 2022 online marketing calendar template itself. So start at the beginning or skip ahead. Regardless of where you start planning, what’s most important is that you start planning your 2022 marketing now. Table of ContentsDownload the free 2022 marketing calendar template2022 marketing holidays by monthHow to use…
On October 4, 2021, Facebook and Instagram experienced a major outage that lasted for at least five hours, preventing people from connecting with their family, friends, and yes — their customers. And this isn’t the first time these platforms, which many small businesses rely on for marketing, have shut down. The last major outage occurred in 2019 and lasted for 24 hours! Back then, as a business coach who focuses primarily on marketing, I received dozens of emails, texts, and direct messages – each one full of distress: “My posts aren’t showing up” “I scheduled posts to go out today!”“I can’t access my group”“I had planned to go LIVE”“I wanted to announce our new product” It’s safe to say that small business owners and marketers everywhere panicked a little during the Facebook outage this past March. Were you one of them? Small business owners use Facebook and Instagram to market their…