Marketing email
A message sent to an audience rather than in response to an action, and the obligations that come with it
A marketing email is sent to an audience because you decided to send it — a newsletter, an announcement, an offer, a re-engagement message. Nobody triggered it by doing anything, which is what separates it from a transactional email.
That difference brings three obligations, everywhere in the world with an email law worth the name:
- Consent. The recipient must have agreed to hear from you. Purchased, rented and scraped lists do not clear this bar and are also the fastest route to a ruined sender reputation.
- A working unsubscribe, honoured promptly and without conditions. See List-Unsubscribe.
- An identifiable sender, including a real postal address in most regimes.
The specific statutes differ — CAN-SPAM in the United States, CASL in Canada, the GDPR and ePrivacy rules in the EU and UK — but no regime lets you skip any of the three.
The grey area
The exemption for transactional mail is narrower than most people assume. A receipt with a promotion on it is marketing. A "your trial is ending" notice is usually transactional; the same notice with three upsells is not. If the message would still be sent when the commercial part was removed, it is transactional.
In Sendly
Marketing goes out as a campaign or through a workflow, usually to a segment or a list. Unsubscribe headers are attached, and an unsubscribe stops every marketing send to that address, every topic it was subscribed to included. It leaves transactional mail alone.