Prospecting you can stand behind

The rule that matters: who you are allowed to email

UK marketing email is governed by PECR — the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations — alongside UK GDPR. PECR draws a distinction that most tools quietly skip: the difference between a corporate subscriber and an individual subscriber.

A limited company, a PLC or an LLP is a corporate subscriber. You may send it marketing email without asking permission first, provided you identify yourself and offer a way to opt out.

A sole trader or an ordinary partnership is treated as an individual subscriber. That needs consent you almost certainly do not have. It does not matter that the address is published on their website or that it starts with “info@”.

LeadLamp treats this as a list of who may be emailed, not a list of who may not. Only companies confirmed at Companies House as a limited company, PLC or LLP enter the email pipeline. Everything else — including anything it could not confirm — goes to a call list instead, with the phone number and address, for you to approach the old-fashioned way. A business it failed to classify is not treated as permission.

What has to be in every email

Every message LeadLamp sends carries, without exception:

• who is writing — a real name and your company name
• your registered postal address
• a working unsubscribe link that takes one click and no login

These are added when the message is sent, not written into the draft. That is a deliberate piece of engineering: you can edit any email as much as you like, and there is no edit you can make that removes the opt-out link, because it was never in the part you are editing.

What happens when someone opts out

Immediately, and everywhere. The click suppresses that address across every offer you run — not just the campaign it came from — permanently, and cancels anything already drafted, approved or scheduled for them. No confirmation email, no “are you sure”, no preference centre designed to wear people down.

A reply asking to be left alone counts too, in whatever words. LeadLamp reads the reply and acts on it before anything else happens to that lead.

Suppression records outlive everything else in the system. Old lead data is deleted on a schedule; the record that someone asked not to be contacted is kept indefinitely, because it is the only thing that guarantees they never are again.

What is collected, and for how long

Business contact data only: a work email address, and where it is published, a name and job role. It comes from public sources — the Companies House register, businesses’ own websites, business directories. No personal social profiles are scraped and no lists are bought.

Contact data for leads that never went anywhere is deleted after twelve months of inactivity. What remains is a record that a message was sent and who approved it, which is what lets you answer honestly if anyone ever asks.

No tracking pixels

LeadLamp does not put an open-tracking pixel on cold email. Partly because replies are the only metric worth acting on, and partly because a hidden image that reports back when a stranger opens your message is exactly the sort of thing that makes people distrust cold email in the first place.

Why cutting corners costs more than it saves

The ICO can and does act on unsolicited marketing email, and complaints come from the recipients themselves. But the likelier damage is quieter: send to unverified addresses in volume and your domain’s reputation drops. Once that happens, your invoices, your quotes and your replies to actual customers start landing in spam folders — and getting a burned domain back takes months, if it happens at all.

That is why sending is paced, why every address is verified first, and why LeadLamp pauses itself the moment bounces climb or anyone reports a message as spam.

A human approves everything

Nothing leaves without you clicking approve. Not the first email, not the follow-ups, not the replies. It is enforced in the database rather than in a setting, so no bug, no future feature and no automation can route around it.

Prospect properly. Sleep fine.

None of this makes prospecting slower. It makes it defensible — and, as it happens, more effective, because a short relevant note to a business that might genuinely want it works better than a thousand that do not.

See the plans or follow a lead through the whole process.

This page explains how LeadLamp is built. It is not legal advice, and it does not replace your own judgement about your own marketing.