 It’s no surprise that most people have multiple email accounts – at least one personal account (usually with a major ISP such as Yahoo!, Gmail, Hotmail, etc.) and one work account. Sending your email campaigns to subscribers at corporate domains seems like a great idea with solid logic behind it – those subscribers are at work 9+ hours a day, can receive your emails almost immediately, making it easier to capture their attention.
The same people may only check their personal email once or twice a day (or even less) with the possibility of your email getting buried and eventually ignored. So why is it that
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receives your email campaigns, but
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does not?
While email marketers are constantly facing the hurdles and requirements imposed by the major ISPs to get their email messages delivered into their subscribers' inboxes, delivery into the inbox of a corporate domain can be even more of a challenge. Why? Because corporate domain filters are unpredictable, without any standard requirements. Lenient filters will allow unwanted spam to pass through. Extremely strict filters will restrict employees from viewing even their own email campaigns. Many corporations rely on 3rd party email security service vendors (such as Postini or Barracuda) to monitor and traffic incoming email to employees, which vary in levels of security as well as considerations of “acceptable” email.
With that said, how do you get through that corporate filter, land in the inbox, and grab the attention of your subscribers? Here are a few things to consider:
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Authenticate your emails. Assigning authentication standards such as DomainKeys, DKIM and/or SPF verifies that your emails are coming from your domain, preventing fraud, forgery and assumptions of spam.
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“Add this email to your safe senders list.” Including this phrase at the top of your emails directing your recipients to take action can ensure that future mailings are safe to be delivered into the inbox.
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Keep content simple. Avoid complex creatives that include videos, JavaScript, and Style Sheets that can either render incorrectly or hide code. Many email clients don’t support such design and will be caught in corporate filters.
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Know your target audience. Assess your content to determine whether it's work/corporate-appropriate and industry-related. In other words, think about what kinds of email content you would or would not allow your own employees to view at work and make changes accordingly.
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Request whitelisting of your IP or domain. If you have a large number of subscribers from the same domain, or a close relationship with a particular corporation/company, consider sending a request to their IT department requesting to whitelist your IP address or domain. This will ensure that emails coming from you will be delivered into their employee’s inbox.
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Be able to let go. There will be some corporate domains that your emails inevitably won’t be delivered to due to extremely strict filters. When all else fails, trust that the subscribers who really want to receive your email will proactively try to reach you, or will sign up with a personal email address.
Try applying these ideas to your next email campaign to improve B2B deliverability. In conjunction with maintaining a good sender reputation by keeping your list clean and sending relevant emails, the corporate domain can become a more manageable beast.
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