You work with a national beverage distributor who’s launching a new product in a few months. They’d like to promote the product to their existing users and already have their email addresses from a partner site, so they blast information that way. What’s wrong with how they’re promoting the product?

If you’re working with a national beverage distributor that promotes a new product by sending emails to users using addresses collected from a partner site, the issue is that they should have obtained explicit user consent before using that data.

• Your customer has used email addresses from a previous company.
• Your customer should have emailed all previous users first.
• Your customer should have asked for consent.
• Your customer should have verified the email addresses.

Explanation:

Using email addresses collected from a partner site to send mass promotional messages without clear, verifiable consent from the individuals is a serious violation of privacy regulations—such as GDPR, CAN-SPAM, and similar laws worldwide—as well as email marketing best practices. Unsolicited emails can trigger spam complaints, harm brand reputation, reduce email deliverability, and even lead to substantial legal penalties. To promote responsibly and legally, the beverage distributor must ensure that explicit consent has been obtained from each recipient before sending marketing communications.