New Zealand law requires that you have consent from your subscribers before you can send them an email, this can make lists purchased from third parties problematic. It is better to build up your subscriber list through customer interactions such as the sale of goods and services, loyalty programs, subscribe forms, gated content, in person at trade shows and other situations where you can obtain their express consent. For more information see: How to ensure you are not sending spam
Beware of purchasing lists from third party providers, just because you have been told that the subscribers on that list have consented to receive marketing emails does not mean that they really have. If there are complaints and the department of internal affairs decides to investigate, it could be you that gets into trouble for sending the email rather than the company that sold you the list. It is your responsibility to ensure that all subscribers on that list have consented.
It is also illegal under New Zealand law to use address harvesting software, many third party lists have been built this way which makes their use illegal. Be very careful where you purchase your lists from to ensure that they are legal and of high quality.
Also consider that many of the people on a purchased list may not realise that they have "consented" to be on it, they may have signed up at a trade show or for another service without noticing the fine print that states their details will be sold for marketing purposes. Most of the people who receive your emails are going to be surprised to recevie it and most of them will mark it as spam. You will always get poor results from a purchased list and since many people feel negatively about receiving spam you could even do harm to your business reputation. We simply do not recommend purchasing a list.
There are third party services that can scan your list for issues and automatically clean bad email addresses or warn you of potential problems, we encourage you to make use of these services to clean your list before importing it into BoltMail. Here are a few you could try (We are working on integrating these services directly into BoltMail and will update this article once completed):
Using one of the above services is still not sufficient to ensure that you have consent or that your email will not receive harmful spam complaints.
We strongly encourage you to confirm all your subscribers so that you have their express consent and so that they will expect to receive further emails from you, please see: Reconfirming your subscribers
