According to Omnisend’s Terms of Use Chapter 9.4, you should import, access, or use in any other way only permission-based subscriber lists in your email marketing activities through our platform. Purchased, third-party, or rented lists must not be used.

Get Permission to Email
​Avoid Stale Lists
​Avoid Improperly Collected Lists
​Avoid Purchased/Rented Lists
​Properly Gather Offline Contacts
​Prepare Relevant Email Content
​Avoid Third-party Marketing
​Terms of Use Violation
​A Check-list of Your Healthy Contacts on Omnisend

Below you will find a list of useful tips, which will help you to follow the best email marketing practices. You will also learn how to avoid any issues and warnings in the account; these include abuse complaints, high unsubscribe rates or high bounce rates.

Please note that not following this guide may result in bad metrics, which damages your and our sender's reputation. Thus, your account may be suspended or even terminated.

For your convenience, we have created seven control questions to evaluate the health of your subscribers' list. You will find them at the end of the article. 

Before you can approach someone through email marketing, they need to opt-in to your list.

Any other type of confirmation might result in issues. Offline list collection, verbal, or other processes offer no proof that the individual wants to receive emails.

Make sure your list is good to use before you import subscribers into your Omnisend list. We understand that some circumstances do not allow online sign-up, but there are ways to properly collect offline lists (e.g. Signup Page at your Conference booth).

In addition, explain everything clearly to your subscribers. Let them know what content they will receive and how often. This way you will avoid high unsubscribes or abuse complaints.

It is good practice to send emails to your subscribers regularly to prevent your list from becoming stale. It happens when your subscribers lose interest, forget they have signed up, or abandon their email addresses (30% of email users change their email addresses annually). Stale lists tend to generate bounces, unsubscribes, and spam complaints.

When a recipient reports your email as spam, it notifies their internet service provider (ISP). This is called a feedback loop. ISPs will block sending domains if they receive enough spam reports. Unfortunately, not all ISPs offer feedback loops. Sometimes spam complaints reach us in other (non-traditional) ways, for example, via email. Such complaints are not displayed in your campaign reports.

Omnisend is strictly a permission-based email delivery service. Sometimes, lists are collected from different sources or even third parties.

When we see lists collected in this manner, we may ask you to do the following:

Even under the best circumstances, purchased/rented lists do not get the same positive results as organically grown list. When you build your list, you collect subscribers who are interested in your product or business and definitely want to hear from you. The opposite is true when you purchase an alien list.

Omnisend’s Terms of Use do not allow you to use purchased or rented lists. These lists often include old and inactive addresses that cause high bounce rates. Worse, many purchased lists contain spam trap addresses, which can lead to blacklisting.

If you have imported a purchased/rented list, we will ask you to delete the entire list or remove the purchased portion of the list.

We do not allow lists that do not have proper opt-in confirmation. If you have gathered your list at a show or in an offline capacity, you must have documented proof of the signup. Moreover, bear in mind, it is common for people to provide invalid email addresses with offline processes, and this can cause high bounce rates. If you have proof of signup, it will help to protect you if someone makes a spam complaint.

Here are examples of the good and bad offline list:

Relevancy is an important aspect of email marketing. Emails work best when subscribers find value in them. If your content does not hold your subscribers' interest, they may mark the email as spam. Promising interesting content but sending only promotional, low-quality mail instead is a good example of irrelevant content.

Third-party marketing is when you decide to market another product or service to your subscribers or when you switch company name. Any time you send a mail as Company A either on behalf of or as Company B, it causes confusion because subscribers did not sign up to receive information from Company B. To introduce a new product, service, or company name, keep the following tips in mind.

Speaking of third-party lists, they are not permitted on Omnisend. These are lists that you may have received from a particular association, organization or company that you have a good relationship with. But these are just a few examples. The reason they cannot be used on Omnisend is that they did not give their explicit permission to receive emails from YOU. They may have given permission to the company (that gave you this list), but this does not allow you to send them promotional emails. Omnisend is a permission-based email marketing company and does not tolerate senders who do not ask for permission before sending emails.

If content or accounts violate our Terms of Use, we will suspend the account for investigation.

The questions below will let you define your list quality and fix any issues you may have. Read them carefully.

Have any additional questions? Feel free to contact us at [email protected].