How do you track 'Inbox Placement Rate' when you are a B2B email marketer?

This is not an easy one, B2B marketers are generally at a disadvantage since most of the monitoring tools available focus on consumer ISP's and not on the B2B appliance side.

However, there are some things you can do

1. Use Inbox Preview tools such as Litmus. They not only can show you how your campaigns will look but they throw in checks on a bunch of the most commonly used anti-spam solutions, giving you an idea of how well your campaign will be delivered.

2. Secondly, tools such as Return Path's Inbox Monitor also monitor a few B2B domains. Might be handy as well

3. Also you can get a general idea based on your open and click rates. If you have specific domains that almost never yield any opens, you might have some issues with that type of SPAM protection.

4. Check reputation scores at SenderBase (Cisco Ironport). The Symantec Brightmail intelligence network, Barracuda Central. They will give you a good idea of the most commonly used reputation databases for B2B protection.

5. Last (and you should read this one with a bit of humor in mind). Go out and buy the major appliances , Symantec Brightmail, Cisco Ironport, barracuda gateway security, and test your campaigns against them :) although this will require a slight raise in your marketing budget ;-)

Hope this helps somewhat ...

Bram Van Daele
Managing Director
Teneo ESP Services
@Teneobelgium