Hotmail has launched a war against greymail that could signal problems for email marketers.
The ESP from Microsoft has launched new tools to categorise newsletters in a different folder so they stop clogging up recipients inboxes. This is a response to customers claiming they are being spammed when in fact they signed up to the emails, either knowingly or not.
While Hotmail is mainly used by B2C marketers, industry experts are split on how relevant these changes are for B2B marketers.
Andy Thorpe, deliverability manager at Pure 360, said, “This auto-newsletter categorisation, like some B2B content filters, targets html newsletters; however it does not filter them out of the inbox, junk filters and manual filters do that. This is merely a quick view that shows people only emails of a certain type: newsletters, from contacts, social notifications, emails with MS Office attachments etc.
“At the B2B level, I’m not sure how many businesses use Hotmail for their work email address, my guess would be none, subsequently B2B marketers should not care at all.”
However, some people think the consequences of the move may be more wide-reaching. Robert Rutherford, CEO of QuoStar Solutions, said, “I don’t think it will greatly affect B2B marketers as Hotmail is predominantly consumer focused. However, I think we’ll see graymail management systems coming into the enterprise very shortly, this will have a big impact on B2B marketing.
“We’ve certainly seen a rise in customers saying they are being spammed, when in fact it may be mail that they have subscribed to in the past. You often see B2B marketers overusing opt-ins; my mailbox is 10 per cent greymail and I, myself, would find a greymail management system very useful.”
