If you are used to selling into the United States, Australian cold email comes as a surprise. There is no general business-to-business exemption. The Spam Act 2003 asks for consent before a commercial email is sent, and that includes an email from one company to a person at another.
That does not make B2B outbound in Australia impossible. It makes it narrower, and it moves most of the work to before the first email: who is on the list, and why each of them is there.
This is how we read the Act and how we run outbound under it. It is not legal advice. If your industry is regulated, check with your adviser before launch.
Consent, and the inferred kind
The Act recognises two kinds of consent. Express consent is the obvious one: someone ticked a box, asked to hear from you, or gave you their address for that purpose. Cold outbound, by definition, does not have it.
The other kind is inferred consent, and this is where B2B outbound lives. An address that has been conspicuously published can carry inferred consent, but only under conditions:
- The publication has to be conspicuous. A business address listed openly on a company website or a public directory, put there so people can make contact. An address someone guessed from a naming pattern, or scraped from somewhere it was not meant to be found, is not the same thing.
- The message has to relate to the person's role. Publishing an address does not invite every offer under the sun. Emailing a finance manager about accounts-payable software relates to their role. Emailing the same person about a holiday package does not.
- The publication must not say no. If the address is published with a statement that the person does not want unsolicited commercial email, the inference is gone.
All three have to hold. That is a much smaller list than "every business email address we can find", and that is the point.
The parts that apply to every email
Even with consent sorted, every message has to do two more things.
Identify the sender. Who the email is from, accurately, with a way to contact them.
Carry a working unsubscribe. And honour it. The Act allows 5 working days to action an opt-out, and the Australian Communications and Media Authority enforces this actively. Clayton Utz's summary of recent ACMA enforcement is a useful read on how seriously the unsubscribe rules in particular are being taken.
How we run outbound into Australia
Translated into practice, Australian campaigns differ from our UK and US ones in four ways.
Only conspicuously published addresses. Australian lists are built from business addresses published where a buyer would expect to find them. Guessed and pattern-generated addresses are left out, even when a tool verifies they exist. Verifying that an inbox exists says nothing about whether consent can be inferred.
Role relevance is checked, not assumed. Before a prospect is added, their role is matched against what the campaign is about. If the offer is aimed at operations leaders, a marketing coordinator at the same company is not on the list, however tempting the account is.
"No marketing" statements are excluded. Where a published address carries a statement declining unsolicited commercial email, the address is dropped.
Opt-outs move faster than the Act requires. We action unsubscribes within 2 business days, which keeps us comfortably inside the 5 working days and also matches what Gmail and Yahoo now expect of bulk senders (more on that in the sender rules piece). Opt-outs go onto a suppression list that is never re-imported.
What this costs, and why it is worth it
Smaller lists mean fewer emails, and anyone selling you Australian outbound on volume alone is either not filtering or not telling you. The trade is that each email goes to someone with a real reason to read it, which is also what keeps spam complaints down and the sending domains healthy. Compliance and deliverability point in the same direction here.
It also changes how we talk about results. We do not promise a number of meetings in any market, and in Australia the honest answer is that a narrower list will produce fewer conversations than a reckless one, at least until the reckless one gets its domains blocked.
The short version
- B2B email in Australia needs consent. There is no blanket exemption.
- Inferred consent requires a conspicuously published address, a message relevant to the person's role, and no "no spam" statement.
- Identify yourself, include a working unsubscribe, and action it within 5 working days.
- Build the list for those conditions before you write a single email.
Our compliance page sets out the rules we work to in Australia, the UK and the US side by side, and the outbound service describes how campaigns are built and checked. If you sell into Australia and want to know whether outbound can work for your offer, tell us who you sell to.