"B to B Online" shares some really awful advice from Gary Halliwell and Mark Feldman of NetProspex about how opt-out is supposedly the way to go in the B2B (business to business) email marketing realm. They start out by banging the CAN-SPAM drum (make sure you're compliant!! yawn) and then get side tracked into targeting and content.
The one thing missing: permission.
The comments are especially interesting; mostly from folks referencing non-existing surveys about how recipients supposedly aren't that irked by spam, and so forth.
I know from working with various B2B spam filterers that they look at what mail they accept (or don't) based on the same old criteria you all already know. Complaints, permission, relevance.
Or am I wrong on that? You tell me, o dear readers; I know some of you are spam filterers and work in the B2B space. What do you think of mailing without permission? Is it mail you'd want to knowingly accept?
And I'd also like to know what B2B recipients actively want this mail. I know at work, we tune our spam filters to reject non-permissioned mail, aka spam. If we didn't ask for it, it's a drain on our time. We're busy folks; we don't want you in our inbox unless we invited you there. I'd be surprised to find a lot of people who feel otherwise.
Update: Mickey Chandler just blogged about this as well, over on Spamtacular.
