Over the last five years, quite a bit has changed regarding digital marketing and the environment that it operates in. Email marketers have favoured cold outreach emails as a great way to prospect new contacts.

A cold outreach campaign is an email marketing campaign sent to a list of email addresses that didn’t directly opt-in with the sender. This means that they will not be expecting to receive the email and may not be receptive to emails of this nature.

Cold email lists have generally been gathered by scraping contact email addresses off of companies’ websites or by purchasing pre-existing lists from list brokers.

Lists of this nature can be fraught with issues though, as people aren’t expecting to receive these emails, they often complain to their service provider and mark them as spam.  Whilst these lists can cause issues, often email marketers were prepared to live with these as long as their campaigns yielded decent sales conversions.

Can you still use these lists though? 

As emailing people without their consent has been an activity that has generated more and more flack, spam filters and email marketing software suppliers have very much closed the door on this type of activity in the last few years.

Spam filters have done this by adding senders using unsolicited lists to a blacklist or a blocklist. This means that if you are using a cold outreach list, then your company domain name will (sooner or later) be added to a spam filter’s backlist. 

If your company domain has been added to a blacklist, it means that all of your future outbound emails will either be blocked entirely from reaching their destination email address  or being delivered to the junk folder.

Spam filters have really strengthened their position on these lists in recent years to such as degree that any success that these lists may have generated has been stopped by routine blacklisting of senders.

Email marketing software suppliers have also prohibited the use of lists where the recipients have not supplied explicit consent to receive emails from the sender.  When importing new email lists, the checks in place mean that all lists of this nature are blocked from usage. Some email marketing software suppliers have even gone as far as blocking the accounts of senders looking to import lists of this nature into their software.

This means that cold outreach email lists have really become a marketing medium whilst cannot be used anymore. Nowadays, email marketers, time is best served to generate smaller lists of people who have consented to receive their communications.