Part 1: User interaction
Part 2: Authentication
Part 3: Domain-based reputation
Part 4: Certification

You can’t avoid the idea of reputation when talking about deliverability.

And we’ve already seen how your reputation as a sender of email will become associated with your domain, making you more accountable for your email activities.

[Accountability is a good thing as long as you're delivering true value to your subscribers. It helps keep bad emailers out of the inbox.]

Still, some marketers wonder just how much attention to give sender reputation.

OK, it plays a major role at big B2C webmail services and ISPs. But small corporate IT departments don’t have the email throughput to start classifying senders using some detailed sender reputation formula.

So can’t B2B list owners safely ignore the topic?

Let our experts guide us…

It is true to say that reputation-based filtering plays a smaller role in B2B than it does in B2C.

George Bilbrey (President) and Tom Sather (Professional Services Director) of Return Path confirm that…

“…content filtering is likely to always be a bigger issue in the corporate world where system administrators may set limits on what employees can receive.”

But that doesn’t mean reputation is irrelevant in B2B. Indeed, Bilbrey and Sather describe the idea that B2B deliverability is only about content filtering as a myth.

Here are three reasons why B2B marketers also need to worry about their sender reputation.

1. Business users have “consumer” email addresses

In the past, many senders regarded free webmail addresses as the preserve of fly-by-night freebie hunters. Webmail has come a long way since then.

Many people use a webmail address today – like Gmail or Windows Live Hotmail – because of the robust feature-rich services offered, integration with other online activities (like chat) and longevity.

So check any B2B email list and you’ll likely find a significant proportion of “real” “active” webmail addresses on it.

For example, 15% of those who opened the last issue of my own niche B2B list did so at a webmail service.

2. “Consumer” webmail services power business addresses

Deirdre Baird, President & CEO of Pivotal Veracity, tells us:

“…ISPs like Yahoo don’t just provide free webmail accounts, but also rank among the largest hosts for businesses.”

She adds:

“Marketers set up their own domain and mail under these hosts, so even though you may think you are sending your mail to a company’s domain, it’s going through the same delivery processes as Yahoo.”

Chris Wheeler, Director of Deliverability at Bronto, also cites the growing spread of big ISPs and webmail services into business mail hosting:

“…the ISPs are increasing their footprint with companies outsourcing mail handling to them, such as Gmail’s popular Google Apps email for companies.”

Google recently noted that “over two million business and 20 million users in over 100 countries” have switched to Google Apps email hosting.

Over a year ago, Al Iverson reported that Yahoo was hosting email for over 125,000 domains.

3. Businesses use third-party email filtering services

We often mistakenly assume that email to a B2B audience must simply negotiate a local spam filter at the destination organization: one that just checks the incoming email’s content.

Pass that test and you’re in.

In an earlier post, Wheeler reminds us there are various deliverability layers to go through with corporate email.

In particular, many businesses are using third-party filtering services to sort email before it gets anywhere near a user.

Since these services process email for hundreds and thousands of businesses, they see enough messages to let them build sender reputation into the filtering equation.

Reputation problems (like too many spam complaints) are also a common reason for ending up on one of the public blacklists that IT departments might use to filter out spam from incoming email.

Jeremy Saibil, Director of Deliverability at Campaigner says:

“…it is important to remember that a considerable number of B2B mailboxes are protected by large filtering companies like Postini, Cloudmark, Message Systems, Barracuda etc, who all very much rely on reputational data to make delivery decisions.”

A similar concept applies to authentication. Baird says:

“…major spam filtering companies such as Postini and Spam Assassin are integrating DKIM into their processes and providing benefits to senders’ that are signing mail from their domains.”

Clearly reputation is important in B2B email marketing. Bilbrey and Sather add:

“We expect, much like major ISPs, corporate filtering companies will come to see reputation as more reliable than content filtering, though we expect them to continue to use both.”

The last word on this goes to Saibil:

“While it may seem as if reputation is lagging a bit behind in the B2B world, it is very much in play. At the end of the day, doing the right thing will be rewarded no matter what system is before you.”

OK, we’re coming to the end of this series on the future of deliverability. The final part offers dozens of useful links to relevant articles, blogs, websites and services. Look out for it in the next few days.