The number of contacts on an email contact list doesn’t mean much if those contacts weren’t gathered properly.

Ronn Torossian, founder of 5WPR says when companies send out their marketing emails, they usually want to send them out to as many contacts as possible on their email contact list. They feel excited about sending out emails to a large list of contacts, especially if they have been working hard to collect as many emails as possible for their lists. However, what many marketing beginners don’t realize is that the number of contacts on an email contact list doesn’t mean much if those contacts weren’t gathered properly. If people on the list haven’t given a company permission to receive emails from them, sending out a promotional email to those contacts will put the business at risk of spam reports, low engagement rates, and even blocks.

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Email consent
Torossian says there are certain best practices that companies need to follow to remain in good standing with their email contact list. When it comes to getting new contacts, it’s best to make sure that every person on the email contact list has given their consent to receive the company’s emails. Any email contact a company gathers needs to give their permission to receive emails before they can be added to the email contact list. If a company continuously sends emails to people that have never subscribed, have unsubscribed, or who have an address that continues to bounce, many email lists, such as Outlook or Gmail, will start to expect more emails from the business. This results in automatically marking those emails as spam, or even not delivering those emails. Aside from obeying those regulations for email marketing, getting consent from the people in the email contact list is the best way to keep a company’s email contact list healthy. Having a healthy email contact list helps companies have a better overall email performance. This strategy will lower the number of bounce and spam rates, which keeps the deliverability rates at a high percentage.

Types of email consent
When it comes to giving consent for receiving emails, consumers have two options:: explicit and implied consent. Explicit consent is the simplest kind of consent, which is when a subscriber manually agrees to receive emails from a business. This is done by confirming their subscription through a double opt-in, written consent, or selecting a checkbox on an email form. Implied consent tends to be a bit more vague, and it happens when a person gives the company their email address for a certain reason, but they haven’t explicitly stated that they want to receive marketing emails. The preferred way for companies to get permission to add someone’s contact information to an email contact list is through explicit consent, which improves the company’s brand reputation.

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