GDPR is the E.U law that came into force in May 2018. After Brexit, the UK adopted it also. GDPR governs the way that companies collect, store and use the personal information of their contacts - in this instance, email addresses.
When GDPR first came into effect, it stated that every person whose data you had collected, had to have consented by positive opt-in before you could send them an email.
What is a positive opt-in?
A positive opt-in means that the person needs to complete a positive action in order to sign up to your mailing list. This could be putting a tick in an unticked box - this action could be agreeing to receive your email marketing.
GDPR says that you can’t use a soft opt-in to gain people’s consent. A soft opt-in is where the consent box is already ticked. This could be on an order confirmation page for example - it may contain a pre-ticked box when you confirm your online order for a product that you have purchased. GDPR defines this is a soft-opt-in, this method can’t be used.
Legitimate Interests
GDPR includes a phrase called ‘legitimate interests, which means that you can continue to email your existing contacts and customers without asking them to follow a positive opt-in. You can do this, because they are your existing contacts and they, therefore, have a legitimate interest in continuing to receive your email marketing.
Shortly after the launch of GDPR, a marketing body successfully lobbied for the phrase ‘legitimate interests’ to broaden out to allow anyone who has a legitimate interest in receiving your emails could be emailed without an opt-in. These people can be cold contacts, they just have to have a potential interest in receiving your emails.
This means that anyone who has two legs, for example, has a legitimate interest in receiving emails from companies selling trousers. It’s so broad that it effectively opened the door for companies to legally bombard all of us with a whole host of emails that we don’t want and didn’t ask for.
So, can you send out cold emails?
GDPR does say, that you can email anyone who it could be argued might have a vague interest in what you are selling. This term of ‘legitimate interests’ is restricted to business email addresses - so you can’t use that clause to cold email consumers.
So, according to GDPR - as long as you are emailing business and as long as you can demonstrate a tenuous link to them perhaps having a legitimate interest in receiving your emails - you are good to go.
But, there’s much more to it than that though….
Will email marketing software suppliers let you use their software to send cold non-opted in emails?
Well, no they won’t. If you are looking to use third-party software to create and send your email campaigns to non opted in lists, then you won’t be able to do this with any of the major players.
Here at Email Blaster, we take the same stance as everybody else, people don’t like receiving emails that they didn’t ask for and we don’t want our network to be used to send these out. Unsolicited email is a real pain and clutters up all of our inboxes with stuff we don’t want and didn’t ask for.
Email marketing is one of the best methods for building loyalty and converting viewers into buyers. It needs to be used correctly though, cold emailing is a nuisance and doesn’t yield decent results. Even though GDPR says you can send unsolicited cold emails to businesses, don’t do it, it does work and any reputable software supplier won’t let you do it.
r design-builder or have a look at some of the pro-designed templates then you are welcome to open a free account and explore the software.