Overview
You may be wondering whether it’s okay to reach out to a lead on their personal email. The short answer? It depends on your business and your use case. This article walks you through when personal emails make sense, when they really don’t, and how La Growth Machine handles this by default.
Key benefits
Clear guidelines on when personal emails are appropriate
Legal awareness to help you stay compliant
Best practices to protect your brand and conversations
How to enable sending emails to personal emails?
As you already know, La Growth Machine can enrich your contact’s information to discover:
Their professional email
Their phone number
Their personal email
If you’re not familiar with how enrichment works, we suggest reading our guide on how enrichment works.
By default, La Growth Machine never sends emails to a lead’s personal email — and that’s intentional. In B2B, it’s generally not a best practice.
Important: if you need to use personal emails for specific cases (such as recruiting or prospecting individual-owned companies), you can enable sending emails to personal emails in the email settings.
Using personal emails for B2B prospection
Doing B2B lead generation? Then you should know that using personal emails is NOT recommended, for two main reasons.
Legal considerations (GDPR)
GDPR compliance: if you are targeting people located in the EU, using a personal email for prospection without consent is against European GDPR law. You are fully liable if you do so without prior consent.
Lead perception and brand impact
Outside Europe: while no law explicitly forbids the use of personal emails for B2B prospection, we still strongly advise against it.
Risk of backlash: your lead may find it irrelevant and ignore you — or worse, consider it rude or intrusive. In that case, don’t expect a warm conversation afterward. Your lead will likely go cold as ice.
Note: the only situation where using a personal email in B2B prospection can make sense is when you are targeting self-employed businesses, such as freelancers.
Using personal emails for recruiting
Recruitment is a very different story.
You should absolutely avoid contacting a lead on their business email to offer them a job at a competing company. That’s a fast way to burn bridges.
In recruiting campaigns, it actually makes sense to use personal emails when they’re available:
It’s more appropriate
It’s more discreet
And it usually leads to better response rates
Tip: when running recruitment sequences, always prioritize personal emails if they’re available and relevant.
FAQs
Should I use personal emails for B2B prospection?
Should I use personal emails for B2B prospection?
In most cases, no. In the EU, it can be illegal without consent, and elsewhere it can harm your brand and response rates.
Does La Growth Machine send emails to personal emails by default?
Does La Growth Machine send emails to personal emails by default?
No. Sending emails to personal addresses is disabled by default and must be manually enabled in the email settings.
What’s the main risk of using personal emails?
What’s the main risk of using personal emails?
Legal exposure (GDPR), poor lead perception, and damaging the relationship before it even starts.