How can I Maintain a Healthy B2B List?

This article is written by Kostas Karagkounis, Deliverability Operations Lead at Emarsys, who is part of the Email Council and its Legal & Deliverability Hub.

How to Maintain a Healthy B2B List

This is the second part of our article series around B2B emails. While there are many similarities between a B2B and B2C mailing, there are still some differences and obstacles when coming to contact list management, as the contact acquisition process or contact lifecycle can differ.

Key differentiators between the two types are:

1. The acquisition method (often through sales, events etc)
2. The targeted contacts are business domains and people with job mobility

Maintaining a healthy list of B2B contacts is essential not only for your effective email marketing and IP reputation but also crucial for your business sales. In order to keep your list clean and healthy these are some tips:

1. Permission: PECR governs the rules on email marketing. While you do not need consent to email “corporate subscribers”, you need to have obtained explicit permission from “individual subscribers” (such as sole traders and some partnerships) to receive emails from you. This can be done either online (opt-in form) or on-site events (with proof of consent).

2. Keep your list up to date: By emailing regularly your B2B contacts, helps to identify any invalid or inactive email addresses fast. Also, in order to avoid issues with job mobility, you should actively monitor any replies to your campaigns in case you receive useful info about people leaving the company, changing position, their replacement and their contact details.

You must ensure you process any new B2B contacts in a way that is fair, lawful and transparent,and comply with PECR where applicable.

3. You can also follow the tips shared here on how to use technology to your benefit to avoid any issues during the acquisition process.
4. Keep track of any reputation related bounces. Since you are targeting business domains it is very common that they have custom filtering settings which block your IP or domain and prevents you to reach your audience. You can always get in touch and address the issue directly with your clients through other channels.

5. Sometimes, simple things work! So, do not forget to encourage your business contacts to add you to their ‘safe senders list’.

As always in email marketing, do not forget the basic principles!

1. Use relevant segmentation to allow you to target your messages more effectively and improve the performance of your email campaigns.

2. Use engagement criteria to ensure better deliverability and special re-engagement campaigns for those contacts who do not interact with your emails.

3. Honor unsubscribes: you must include an unsubscribe link in every email you send.