Email Nobody Asked For

Nobody sets out to send spam

Small businesses do not buy lists or send to strangers, and they still end up sending email nobody asked for.

It happens one reasonable decision at a time: a business card collected at an event, an address from a quote request two years ago, a contact form submission, somebody who once bought something.

Each of those is a real person with a real connection to the business, which is what makes adding them feel legitimate.

The question is not whether you know them. It is whether they agreed to receive this.

The grey cases

• A business card handed over at an event.
• An enquiry from two years ago.
• A customer who bought once, some time back.
• An address on a company website.
• Somebody a colleague suggested.
• A supplier you deal with regularly.

None of those is obviously wrong and none is a clear yes, which is exactly why they are the ones that cause problems.

The test that works

Simpler than the rules and usually gives the same answer.

Would this person be surprised to receive it.

Somebody who ticked a box asking for your newsletter will not be surprised. Somebody who asked you to quote for a driveway in 2019 will be.

Where the honest answer is that they might be surprised, the safe course is to ask rather than to send.

That question also catches the situations the rules handle awkwardly, such as a long-standing customer you have never emailed, where the legality may be arguable and the relationship is the thing at risk.

The Canadian framework, briefly

Canada's anti-spam legislation has been in force since 2014 and shapes how this works here.

Broadly, it distinguishes express consent, where somebody actively agreed, from implied consent arising from an existing relationship, and implied consent expires.

A purchase or contract creates implied consent for a period, commonly cited as two years from the transaction. An enquiry creates a shorter window, commonly cited as six months.

Messages also have to identify who is sending and provide a working way to stop receiving them.

This is a general description rather than legal advice, and the detail matters, so confirm the position for your own situation.

The practical consequence is the useful part: an address collected years ago has almost certainly stopped being permission.

Ask at the point of collection

The habit that removes almost all of this.

When somebody gives you an address for any reason, that is the moment to ask whether they would like occasional email, and to record their answer.

At an event, ask before writing on the card. On a form, a separate unticked box rather than a condition of enquiring. After a job, ask while you are there.

It takes a sentence, most people say yes when asked by somebody they have just dealt with, and the resulting list is one you can send to without hesitation.

The alternative is a larger list you feel uneasy about, which is worse in every respect including its results.

Record how and when

The part everybody skips and the part that matters when it is questioned.

For each address, note where it came from, on what date, and what they agreed to.

Signed up on the website on this date is a complete record. Met at a trade show is not.

Most mailing tools store this if the address arrives through their form, and the gap is always the addresses added manually, which are exactly the ones most likely to be questioned.

Keeping the record also makes cleaning the list possible later, since you can tell which entries have a basis and which do not.

Without it, a list is undifferentiated and the only safe assumption is the most cautious one.

A worked example

A business built a list of about six hundred addresses over several years, mostly from quote requests and business cards, and sent a newsletter for the first time.

The response included a meaningful number of complaints, several replies asking how they had been added, and two people who were genuinely annoyed because they had never become customers.

Deliverability suffered afterwards for months, which affected ordinary business email as well as the newsletter.

They rebuilt from a base of people who had actually opted in, which was around ninety addresses.

That smaller list produced more enquiries in its first three sends than the six hundred had produced at all.

Their conclusion was that the large list had never been an asset, it had been a liability they had not yet triggered.

What it costs to get wrong

Beyond the regulatory position, which is the part people focus on.

Complaints damage your domain's standing with mail providers, and that affects every message you send including quotes and invoices.

A person who receives unwanted email from a local business remembers it, and small markets have long memories.

And the list itself becomes unusable, since you cannot tell the willing recipients from the unwilling ones without asking, which is the thing you avoided doing at the start.

The regulatory risk is real and is frequently the smallest of the three.

The counter-case

Excessive caution has a cost too.

A business that never asks for an address, never emails its customers, and treats every contact as untouchable is discarding the cheapest marketing available to it.

Existing customers generally want to hear from a business they have used, and a business that never contacts them is not being respectful, it is being absent.

There are also legitimate business-to-business situations with different expectations, where a relevant message to a relevant company is normal practice.

Ask properly, keep the record, send something worth receiving, and make stopping easy. That is the whole of it.

The rules that keep you safe

1. Ask when you collect, every time.
2. Record where, when, and what they agreed to.
3. Treat anything ambiguous as a no.
4. Assume old addresses have expired.
5. Identify yourself in every message.
6. Make stopping easy and honour it immediately.
7. Prefer ninety willing to six hundred uncertain.

Step one is the whole article, since a list built by asking never produces any of the situations above.

Making it easy to leave is covered in the unsubscribe link you should make easy.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.