Email opt-in laws

[Jennifer_Bisho1]

We have sent out an email to a purchased list that included the following question: “Would you like to continue to receive emails from our company?” They can then choose yes or no.  If they clicked no, I ran a triggered campaign to change them to unsubscribed so we don't risk emailing them again.  Keep in mind that these are not customers of ours, just potential prospects.  My question is, If they don’t click on yes or no, are we allowed to send another email to them?  Or can we only send to those who actually clicked yes?  If you happen to have a document/link that explains these legal issues, that would be great.

[Rachel_Noble]

If they don't explicitly opt-in, you run the risk of violating CASL if you keep emailing them. Do you have country data for these leads?

My thought is: why are you asking them to opt in if you want to keep emailing them? If they're not in Canada or the EU and you want to email them until they opt out, then don't send the Opt In email and just send them marketing emails until they unsubscribe. If they're in Canada or the EU, then if they don't respond to the email they should be unsubscribed.

Personally, I wouldn't email them unless they Opt In just to be safe. Glad you asked! This is a hot topic right now.

[Jennifer_Bisho1]

Yes, these are all US leads.  I know EU has much stricter laws (my company has international locations).

Believe me, I tried to talk them out of emailing to a purchased list lol (which was over 7K people!).  Being that they are not our customers, and probably don't even know who we are, we included that opt-in question to be safe.  I was just wondering that being we included that question, if we can keep emailing them if they did not click yes.  The email performance was terrible so I feel emailing them again is going to be a lost cause anyway, but I was hoping to provide some sort of documentation to help me push back on having them do that again.

[Dan_Stevens_]

Be careful with this.  A couple well-known companies did the same thing - albeit a global list, not just US - and were fined pretty heavily (see ICO fines Flybe, Honda for breaking data rules. They were, um, trying to comply with GDPR • The Regi...).  They wanted to do this ahead the EU GDPR regulations being put in place next May.  Rather than "let's send out a blanket email to our entire DB to get them to opt-in", a better approach would be to indirectly include the appropriate messaging/CTA in all your emails.  Something like, "do you find our content valuable?  If so, subscribe to this content (CTA button) and we'll be sure to send you relevant content like this in the future".  Ideally, this would drive to some sort of email preference center.

[Jennifer_Bisho1]

Yikes!  That's crazy.  Thankfully our EU team sends their own emails, and are very aware of these laws and follow them.  But my main question is, can we keep sending them emails if they did not click yes to continue to receive emails in the future?  Of course we would not send an email to those that have actively unsubscribed, but I wasn't sure if we could send another email to those that did not engage.  If it were up to me, I would not send to those people again, unless maybe just to those who at least opened the initial email.

[Dan_Stevens_ · Accepted solution]

Theoretically/legally, yes.  As you know, the US has some of the most lax anti-spam laws in the world.  As long as you honor all unsubscribes, you're fine.  Just know that by introducing this new language, you've now set the expectation that "I will only receive emails if I select YES".  So some users may get upset when they continue to receive emails from you.

[Jennifer_Bisho1]

Ugh!  I was hoping we couldn't email them again...haha.  Oh, I'm sure they will get upset regardless.  I'm going to at least make the suggestion to only send to those that opened the first email.  The email stats for that send were horrendous, so I really would hate to send to that whole list again.

[Tom_Kerlin2]

See point #3 in this Litmus article: The 5 Most Problematic Subscriber Acquisition Sources: Are they redeemable? – Litmus Software, Inc. to better understand the risk of using purchased lists - You do risk breaking non-U.S. laws.