Earlier this week Ken Magill talked about B2C Direct Marketers finally seeing the benefit of opt-in marketing vs. opt-out. Ken talks about the shift from 23% of Direct Marketer sending opt-out in 2006 to only 14% in 2007. These numbers are even more impresive in the B2B world, a wopping 3.1% of these DM’ers are sending opt-out comunications, down from 16.7% last year.

Why the big drop? Mailing B2B is more complex then B2C, corporate filters are tuned to the needs of a business (thousands of people) and not to the consensus of a large ISPs user base (millions of people). B2C also tend to have additional rules or restrictions on their users and the acceptable use of company resources.

Inversley several people have been part of a discussion around password protected unsubscribes. Are these really necessary? Their doesn’t seem to be a clear answer to this question. There may be some cases where you would want to have these options secure behind a login but I can see why can’t a user simply say – don’t send me any more email about this item without using a password? Forgotten passwords or frustrations waiting to receive these passwords will lead to more complaints, which in time may lead to blocking or filtering.

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