How the basis gets decided
This is the post that matters. Everything else in this system is plumbing, and this is the part that determines whether the thing you have built is useful or is a way of emailing people who did not ask to be emailed.
Key takeaways
- The field label determines the purpose. “Where shall we send your quote?” is specific.
- How far through matters: somebody at step four of five was clearly transacting.
- Two clear ends: a labelled address deep in a transactional form, and a footer newsletter box.
- The arguable middle exists, and the honest handling is to decline it.
- Where a person is already a customer, the question is different and usually easier.
The label decides
The single most useful principle here: what an address may be used for is determined by what the person was told when they typed it, not by what the business would like to do with it. That is both the legal shape of it in most regimes and the shape most people would recognise as fair.
| Field label | What it permits | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| “Where shall we send your quote?” | Sending them that quote | Contactable about this |
| “Your email (so we can confirm the booking)” | Confirming that booking | Contactable |
| “Email” on a multi-step enquiry | Responding to the enquiry | Usually contactable |
| “Get our newsletter” | Sending the newsletter, if confirmed | Not contactable about this |
| “Email” in a footer box, no context | Nothing, without a confirmation | Not contactable |
| A field they filled during checkout | The transaction | Contactable, narrowly |
The third row is the common case and the one worth thinking about. A bare “Email” field in the middle of a multi-step enquiry form carries its context from the form around it: somebody filling in a bathroom quote request understands what the address is for. A bare “Email” field in a footer carries no context at all.
How far through
- App integration
- Machine learning
- Security & identity
- Front-end & mobile
Past the halfway step
Somebody who entered their email on step one of five and stopped has expressed interest in the way that clicking a link expresses interest. Somebody who reached step four has spent several minutes providing specific information about a specific job, which is a materially different act.
Halfway is a rule of thumb rather than a principle, and the useful version of it is: did they give you enough that a reply would be about their actual situation rather than a generic prompt? If the message can only say “you started a form”, the basis is thin. If it can say “you were most of the way through a quote for a bathroom in Ashford”, the person will recognise it as a continuation of something they were doing.
Existing customers
A much easier case and worth separating explicitly. Somebody who has bought from you before, abandoning a form on your site, is in an existing relationship and the question of whether you may email them about something they were evidently trying to do is not a difficult one.
It is still one message, and it still respects any withdrawal. The difference is that the label and step-depth gates matter less, because the basis comes from the relationship rather than from the form.
The arguable middle, and what to do with it
- App integration
- Machine learning
- Security & identity
- Management
The arguable band is real and it is where every implementation of this drifts over time, one reasonable-sounding widening at a time. The practical defence is to make declining the default for the middle band and to require an explicit configuration change, with a recorded reason, to move a form out of it.
That reason then sits in the configuration where whoever asks about it later can read it, which is a much better position than reconstructing a decision from a threshold somebody moved eighteen months ago.
Next: what the one message says.
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