Handling German anti-spam requirements for list purchased leads

[Nina_Valtcheva5]

Our EMEA team is working with an agency to purchase lists of German leads to invite them to our marketing events in Germany.

I am very wary of this because of the strict anti-spam laws since many of these leads have no prior business relationship with our company. I have advised against list purchases, but it's not up to me to give the final say.

I already have an approach for getting double opt-in from leads already in our database, but this is a separate case since we have no prior relationship with these list build leads. There seems to be very little information available online and most of it is in German.

Interested to see if anybody has faced a similar situation and how you would go about contacting list purchased leads.

[Anonymous]

If I understand the law correctly you are not allowed to do this in Germany at all.  You must have an opt in to send to them.  The way you may get around this is to send via the partner you purchased from as they may introduce you to them as they have an opted in relationship.

[Josh_Hill13]

Yes, that is the appropriate way in Germany. Frankly, this is the ONLY way you should purchase leads. You should never send to a purchased list unless they somehow opted in to your emails.

I would ask your team to check with their legal team or local EU lawyer before they do this. It's probably against the law for that firm to even send you private data.

The other question to ask: is the agency sourcing leads by phone to register for your event and then sending the lead info to you? I don't love that option, but it could be legal. Someone really needs to check on that on the legal team.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi all,

If I may bring in a European voice in this , I confirm what Jamie said. Never do this in Germany (and in quite few EU countries BTW). In some other European countries, there is a little more tolerance in B2B businesses only (See below).

The right way to do this is for Germany (and the most recommended way every where, BTW) :

• Have your partner route the leads on their behalf IF they have an opt-in on these lists and use CTAs that point to your registration landing page
• On the landing page the should contain an UNCHECKED opt-in field.
• When people fill out the form and CHECK the opt-in checkbox, you send them the opt-in confirmation email.
• On click on validation link in the opt-in confirmation email, you can consider the person is Double Opt-IN.

By the EU directive, Opt-out is the minimum requirement for B2B communications, but this is left to country laws to be stricter on this.

The following Table from Celsius gives a good set of practices for B2B (the original source is here : Whitepaper - B2B email marketing European legislation | B2B Marketing ) :

In B2C, it's very simple: double opt-in everywhere and no email to a database without previous consent whatsoever.

-Greg

[Nina_Valtcheva5]

Thank you Greg! This is extremely helpful!