How We Email
How We Email
You may have arrived here from an email you did not ask for. If so, this page exists for you rather than for us. Where we got your address, what we do with it, and how to make it stop in one word.
On this page · 7 sections
Where we got your address
We did not buy it
Not from a list broker, not from a “verified B2B database”, not from a data append service, not from anyone. We do not purchase lists of any kind, consumer or business.
If we emailed you cold, one of these is true:
- It is published on your website, a contact page, a footer, a team page. The address a business publishes in order to be contacted.
- It is in a public directory, a chamber listing, a trade association, a licensing board, a Google Business Profile.
- Someone introduced us, or we met at something.
- We worked out the pattern from your domain, if your team page shows first.last@, and you are on the team page, we can do the arithmetic. We check it is a live mailbox before sending so we are not filling your postmaster’s logs.
That is the whole list. We do not compile information about you as a private individual, and we do not have your personal email, your mobile, or anything you did not publish.
And we actually looked at your business first
If the email mentioned something specific, your form not submitting on a phone, a four-second load, a Google profile with no posts since 2023. That is because someone opened your site and checked. We are a small shop and the outreach is done by hand, a few dozen a day, by people who work here.
That is not a virtue, it is just the truth about the scale. But it does mean if we got something wrong about your business, you can reply and tell us, and a person will read it.
The unglamorous part
Deliverability is mostly hygiene, and most of what makes an email land in spam is the sender’s fault rather than the recipient’s filter.
- Authentication configured properly. SPF, DKIM and DMARC, on every sending domain we use and every one we build for a client.
- Addresses verified before sending. Bouncing into dead mailboxes is what wrecks a sending reputation, and it is entirely avoidable.
- Separate sending domains for outreach and for transactional mail, so a bad week on one never touches your invoices.
- Volume kept low and steady. Dozens a day by hand, not thousands at once. Slower, and it works.
- Complaints watched. If people mark our mail as spam, the answer is to change what we send rather than to send it harder.
This is the same setup we build for clients, and it is the reason we can talk about it. We run it on ourselves first.
What we will not do
Most of what makes cold email unbearable is optional. We do not do any of it.
Fake reply threads
No RE: on a message that is not a reply. No fabricated quoted text below the fold pretending we spoke before. If we have not emailed you, the subject line will not suggest we have.
“Just following up” seven times
Following up is fine and we do it. Following up until you reply out of exhaustion is a different thing. We stop when it is clear the answer is no, and the answer being nothing is usually the answer being no.
Fake personalization
No “I loved your recent post” about a post nobody read. No “I noticed you’re hiring” pulled from a job board by a script. If we mention something about your business, we looked at it.
Manipulative subject lines
No “quick question” when it is not. No invoice-shaped subject lines, no urgency we invented, no “you missed our call.” Getting an open by lying is a poor way to start.
Hiding who we are
Every message says Black Tiger Digital, comes from a real person here, uses a real reply-to address that reaches us, and carries our postal address at the bottom. You should never have to work out who emailed you.
Making it hard to leave
No unsubscribe link that leads to a preference center with nine checkboxes. No “are you sure?” No login required. One click, or one word in a reply.
How we use AI, since you were wondering
Everyone assumes a cold email was written by a machine. Ours are not, quite, and the honest version is more interesting than either extreme.
What it does
Drafting and tidying. Turning a scruffy set of notes into a readable paragraph. Suggesting a subject line. Catching the sentence that runs on for three lines. The same things you would use it for.
What it does not do
It does not decide who gets contacted, and it does not press send. A person picks the businesses, a person looks at the website, a person writes the specific observation that makes the email worth reading, and a person reads the draft before it goes.
The reason is practical rather than principled. The only part of a cold email that works is the sentence proving somebody actually looked, and that sentence cannot be generated. It has to be observed. Automation buys the time to write it. It does not write it.
What we will not use it for
Impersonating a person who does not exist. Fabricating a shared connection, a previous conversation, or a detail about your business we have not verified. Generating volume for its own sake.
If you reply to one of our emails, a person reads it and a person answers. There is no bot in that loop and there never will be.
If you are a client
Different arrangement, and worth being clear about.
- Project email is not marketing. Kickoff, approvals, staging links, invoices. Those come whether or not you are subscribed to anything, because they are the work.
- Anything else is opt-in and unsubscribing from it changes nothing about your project or your care plan.
- We do not sell or share your address, or your customers’ addresses, with anyone.
- Your customers’ data is yours. When we build an email system for you, the list is on infrastructure you own and we do not use it for anything.
Making it stop
Any of these works. None of them requires a reason and none of them requires you to be polite about it.
| How to stop it | What happens |
|---|---|
| Click unsubscribe | One click. No confirmation page, no preference options, no login. Effective immediately. |
| Reply with “stop”, “no”, or anything at all like it | A person reads every reply. You do not have to find the link. |
| Email [email protected] | Same result. |
| Call +1-248-205-6977 | Also fine, and you will get a person. |
| Ask us to delete what we hold | We will, and we will confirm it. See the privacy policy for what we hold in the first place. |
What “stop” actually means here
You go on a do-not-contact list that every stage of our process checks against, not just the email tool. That means no email, no call, and no mail. It is permanent, it survives someone re-finding your business six months later, and it is not undone by you filling in a form on our website afterwards.
If we ever contact you again after you have asked us not to, that is a mistake rather than a tactic, and we would want to know about it.
The legal bit, briefly
Our email complies with CAN-SPAM: accurate headers and sender identity, no deceptive subject lines, a physical postal address in every message, a working unsubscribe, and opt-outs honored well inside the required window, usually within minutes rather than the ten business days the law allows.
Where recipients are in Canada or the EU, additional consent rules apply and we follow them.
The full division of responsibility across email, messaging, privacy and the rest is in compliance responsibilities, and what we actually hold about you is in the privacy policy.
Still here?
Then either the email was relevant or you were curious about the page. Both are good outcomes.
If you want to know what we would actually do for your business, the prices are published and the recommendation takes ninety seconds without giving us an email address.
Or make it stop, genuinely, no hard feelings.
- Published pricing
- Month to month, no minimum term
- You own everything
