If, like me, you have trialled a few email marketing software providers, you are probably familiar with the pros and cons: on the plus side, the software can manage your bounce backs and unsubscribes and gives you great numbers on engagement and open-rates.
On the minus side, many of the market leaders will not allow you to upload bought-in mailing lists to their system. They fear that you may upload a cheap, scraped list that will do serious damage to their white-listed IP addresses and servers. You may be asked to tick a box to agree to upload only your own data or data that is ‘opt-in’.
But GDPR has done away with a bought ‘opt-in’ list in the UK and Europe. Businesses can email another business using the basis of Legitimate Interests (consent is mandatory for marketing to consumers). And the US email broadcasting providers have not updated their practices to account for this.
The good news is that UK email broadcasters have seized the opportunity that GDPR has handed to them.
They will allow you to use bought in and third party mailing lists on their email broadcasting systems providing your mailing lists comply with GDPR which means that the data is current and up to date, the data has been compiled legitimately (not scraped from the internet by software trawling the web for email addresses) and that the data is stored securely.
Maybe it is time to move away from the US market leaders and try something British.
ZoomMail in Plymouth offers a deal where you can sign up to send 1,000 emails for free every month.
E-shot by Forfront in Epsom will also accept bought-in email lists from reliable mailing list providers.
Electric Marketing recommends that you use email broadcasting software. If you want to take advantage of our money back guarantee for “hard bounces”, email marketing software will package up the hard bounces in an Excel spreadsheet which you can send to us. If you are using something not designed for the job such as MS Outlook to send your emails, you will be dragging and dropping the hard bounces into an Excel spreadsheet manually.
Every hard bounce email that Electric Marketing receives is checked with a phone call to the company before a refund is given.
Can you recommend your email marketing broadcaster? Does their contract allow you to send emails to bought in mailing lists? Point us in the direction of these new email software suppliers and we will add them to Electric Marketing’s short list of recommended suppliers.
(Updated January 2024)