Understanding compliant lists

You will learn

Learn about Klaviyo's requirements for permission-based marketing lists. Before uploading a list, consider whether the list has engaged contacts and complies with our Terms of Service.

Terms of service regulations

Under Klaviyo’s Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy, you must have permission to send people marketing messages. This means:

• No third-party lists
• No prospecting lists
• No purchased lists or lists that you scraped from websites
• No Chambers of Commerce lists, etc.
• No contacts who have unsubscribed from your marketing

Klaviyo only supports permission-based sending.

What counts as permission

What counts as permission varies both by country and channel.

With Klaviyo, you always need express consent for SMS marketing, meaning someone directly told you that they want to receive marketing messages from you via text.

Express consent is also preferred for email and is required in some jurisdictions. You can rely on implied consent for email only where applicable law allows it and while it remains valid.

Learn about the difference between express and implied consent.

When importing a list, only mark contacts as subscribed if they have given you express consent for that channel. Adding contacts to a list does not itself establish permission to send marketing messages.

Types of lists

If you are planning to import a list that is not your main email list, consider the following questions:

• Did someone subscribe to this list by filling out a sign-up form online or at an event?
• Is this list a subset of your main email list? For example, email subscribers who live in Boston or are female subscribers?
• Does this list contain email subscribers grouped because of something they’ve done or not done? For example, a list of customers that have all purchased a specific product?

If your list contains opted-in subscribers who have signed up directly to receive marketing emails from you, this is a list you’ll want to import into Klaviyo.

If your list contains a subset of your email subscribers grouped because of a specific quality or something they’ve done or not done, use Klaviyo's dynamic segments instead of maintaining a separate list. First, make sure those subscribers are in Klaviyo and that the profile properties or purchase data needed to define the subset have been imported or synced.

Segments are defined by a set of conditions. This means they grow as new people meet the conditions and shrink as people no longer meet them; whereas lists are static. If you create a list of contacts that represents a subset of another list, you will have to maintain this yourself as new people meet the subset's conditions. This means you will manually have to add and remove contacts. If you replace such lists with dynamic segments, Klaviyo will automatically keep the segment up-to-date based on the definition you establish.

Segments can include profiles from across your account, including people who have not opted in to marketing. To limit a segment to your main email list, add the If someone is in or not in a list condition, select is, choose your main email list, and join this condition to your other conditions with AND.

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