Occasionally I talk to somebody who opines that because they don't send to Yahoo, they don't need to follow Yahoo's rules. The point is rarely that simplistic, but it does usually boil down to this: "I'm a B2B sender. All of my lists are B2B recipients only. My lists are comprised of nobody but business professionals, for example. Yahoo or Hotmail's sender guidelines don't apply to me, do they?"
Yes, they do apply. And here is a great data point as to why:
Mark Brownlow of Email Marketing Reports checked his own B2B lists. What did he find? 11% were Gmail, 4.6% were Hotmail, and just about 8% were Yahoo. That's almost a quarter of his list. And they are all B2C providers, with the typical B2C rules and requirements that senders have come to know and love: Keep complaints low. Subscriber engagement matters. Opt-in permission rules.
Mark's list makeup is typical. There's nothing too surprising there. The take-away here? B2C rules matter, even in a B2B world.
