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[Magilla Marketing] An eye-popping 39% of business-to-business marketers have no formal permission practices in place for collecting e-mail addresses, according to a study conducted recently by Magilla Marketing’s parent publications, Direct and Multichannel Merchant.

In comparison, 7% of consumer marketers in the survey said they have no formal permission practices in place for their e-mail.

With fighting spam remaining such a contentious topic in Internet-related discussions, are business marketers out of touch? No, say marketing experts.

The stark differences in the numbers are an indication of the vastly different relationships B-to-B sellers and buyers have with one another, not evidence that B-to-B marketers are significantly “spammier” than their consumer marketing counterparts, they say.

“In business-to-business marketing, typically they’re calling on people with whom they have an existing relationship,” said Tricia Robinson, vice president, marketing strategy for Premiere Global Services’ marketing automation division.

Also, business buyers are paid to stay on top of the latest innovations in their industries and are less likely to get worked up over what might be considered an unsolicited pitch in consumer marketing, according to Ruth Stevens, a B-to-B marketing consultant and columnist for Direct.

“Business buyers need information to do their jobs properly, so generally they welcome information from their vendors—even prospective vendors,” she said. “Did you notice that business relationships were excluded from do-not-call legislation? Why? Because of this very fact. … Thank God our legislators have recognized that a business-buying relationship is different from a consumer-buying relationship.”

As a result, Stevens said, B-to-B marketers have not had to worry as much about their e-mail address gathering practices as consumer marketers.

This is not to say, however, that business-to-business marketers don’t spam, she said.

“There are bad actors everywhere,” said Stevens. “Even in the B-toB world, there are overly persistent salespeople who you wish would go away. Similarly, you’re going to be receiving e-mail communications from businesses that are not solving your business problem and can never solve it. Most business buyers are annoyed by that when it happens.”

Business buyers also tend to define relationship more forgivingly than consumers.

“Say I go to a trade show in the widget industry, stop by a widget-vendor booth and I either have my badge swiped or I leave a business card, and I have a conversation with the widget vendor. I feel perfectly comfortable having that widget-vendor call me or e-mail me,” said Stevens. “In B-to-B, that’s a generally accepted practice.”

Both Robinson and Stevens said deliverability is a bigger challenge in business-to-business e-mail than it is in business-to-consumer e-mail because corporate e-mail administrators often have overly strict spam filters.

“The filtering problem is a real challenge,” said Stevens. “I can’t tell you the number of marketers I talk to who say that their 100% legitimate e-mail communications are being filtered and they need to phone their contact and ask them to go to their IT department and get them whitelisted. It’s a pain for everybody.”

Stevens also said she generally doesn’t recommend e-mail for business-to-business prospecting, except for some sectors where rented lists still work, such as information technology.

In other findings, 60% of consumer marketers surveyed said they used the single-opt-in method of e-mail address gathering where registrants get a confirmation e-mail when they sign up for a list, but only need to reply if they want off the list.

Seven percent of consumer marketers said they use double opt-in method, where registrants must respond to the confirmation e-mail to stay on the list.

Twenty percent of consumer marketers and 19% of business-to-business marketers said they engage in opt-out e-mail marketing where e-mail addresses are fair game until the inbox owner asks to be removed from the marketer’s list.

Twenty six percent of business marketers surveyed said they use the single opt-in method, and 3% said they use double opt in.

Look for more survey results, such as whether e-mail budgets are headed up or down, in the Email Trends special supplement appearing in April issues of Direct and Multichannel Merchant.