Commercial Email Lists: Legal Issues
Under current UK/EU legislation different rules apply to emailing businesses as opposed to consumers, and if you are in doubt as to the legality of any mailing you should consult a specialist lawyer as IANAL. The following outlines the rules and should help you stay within the law.
Business to Consumer (B2C) mailings
Promotional mailings to consumers are tightly controlled, so the rules are very simple.
Put simply, you are not allowed to send unsolicited marketing emails to consumers unless you have express permission to do so.
Permission is normally gained by the recipient having opted in to receive emails from you. This permission can be either direct, or it may be via a third party. Instances of 3rd party permissions can be where a consumer has subscribed to a magazine and at the same time agreed to receive emails from selected businesses to whom the publisher may have ‘sold or rented’ his database. Another example is where the consumer has joined an online competition line with one of the conditions for free competition entry being that the consumer must agree to receive email marketing information from other parties to whom the competition organisers have rented their lists.
In the above instances it is generally safe to work with such lists.
In general, avoid renting or buying email lists from unknown list brokers or hard-to-verify sources such as eBay. The vendors of such lists may claim that the lists have permission but in many cases they are lists made up of harvested addresses, and using them for your consumer mailings may result in prosecution and having your website / email addresses blocked for spamming. It is no defence to say that you believed the list to be opt-in when you acquired it on-the-cheap.
Business to Business (B2B) mailings
Here, life is a little easier and oddly works almost in reverse.
It is permissible to email marketing messages to business addresses unless the recipient has specifically requested that he/she does not wish to receive further emails from you.
If after receiving such a request you continue to email them you are then committing an offence and are potentially liable to be fined – which could be as much as £5,000 per offence. An address such as james@aol.com is not considered to be a business address – even though some smaller businesses use AOL addresses. Other free email addresses such as jenny@hotmail.com or gary@gmail.com are also not considered legitimate business email addresses.
The law may be one thing, but being accused of spamming and having your site taken down and being blacklisted by the ISPs is another and can happen even if you follow these rules. Just because the law says you can send unsolicited commercial emails providing that the recipient is able to opt out, for the sake of your business you should play safe and stay with proven opt-in email addresses.
When building your list, we recommend that you get permission from your recipients at the various touch-points to your business. For example, they sign-up via an online form, or they drop their business card in the ‘send me promotional mail’ box, they fill in a survey or response form and are asked for their permission to send emails, etc. This way you will build a clean list with minimal risk of being flagged as a spammer. Take care to use credible sources of business mailing lists if you are purchasing lists to target specific audiences.