You will sort an existing list or contact export into contacts you can email for marketing and contacts you cannot.
Ask most small business owners how big their email list is and they will give you a number. Ask where those addresses came from and what each person agreed to, and the answer gets vague. Some are in the email tool, some in a spreadsheet from a market stall, some in the phone, and a few hundred in an old event registration export nobody has opened since.
This exercise turns that vague answer into a clear one. You will gather every contact you hold, trace each group back to where it came from, and sort it into people you can email for marketing and people you cannot yet. It uses what you learned in lesson 1.2, Consent under the PDPA: what you need before you send, and lesson 1.3, The Spam Control Act and unsolicited email. Set aside about half an hour, longer if your contacts are spread across many places.
Start by listing every place a customer's email address might be sitting. Typical places for a small Singapore business include:
your email tool's existing list or lists the contacts or customers table in a CRM, booking system or online shop spreadsheets from events, workshops, open houses or market stalls WhatsApp Business contacts that include an email address your own inbox, from people who wrote to ask about prices paper sign-up sheets or business cards in a drawer
Export what you can into separate files and keep them apart for now. Mixing them before you know their history is how unsubscribed and never-consented contacts end up back on a newsletter.
For each source, answer one question: when people gave their address here, what were they told it would be used for? Be honest, and if you do not know, write "unknown".
Look at the actual wording if it still exists. An online order form might have had a separate checkbox for marketing. A market sign-up sheet might have had "Join our mailing list" printed at the top, or it might have been a blank sheet for a lucky draw. A WhatsApp enquiry carried no promise of marketing at all.
Now put each source into one of three groups.
Clear marketing consent: people were told they would get marketing email and actively agreed, for example by ticking an unticked box or joining a list labelled as a newsletter. These people can receive marketing email.
Transaction only: people gave their address to buy, book, get a quote or ask a question, with nothing said about marketing. They can receive emails about their order or enquiry, but not your newsletter.
Unclear: you cannot tell what people were told, or the record is gone. Treat these as not yet consented.
Anyone who has unsubscribed or asked to stop, from any source, goes on a do-not-email note whatever group they would otherwise be in.
Here is how Mei Ling, the Punggol home baker from lesson 1.2, filled in her audit. The figures are an example.
Her email tool held 180 subscribers who joined through a newsletter form on her website, which said what she would send and how often. That source went in the clear consent group.
Her online order form held 410 customer addresses. Until last month it had no marketing checkbox, so those customers gave their address only to place an order. Transaction only.
A spreadsheet from two weekend markets held 95 addresses. The sheet had been headed "Lucky draw: leave your email". Nobody was told about a mailing list, so it went in the unclear group.
Her inbox held about 60 people who had asked for a quote and never ordered. Transaction only.
Seven people across those sources had asked her to stop emailing. They went on the do-not-email note.
Her audit sheet had one row per source and these columns: source name, where it lives, what people were told, date range collected, number of contacts, consent group, and can receive marketing (yes or no). Totalled up, she had 180 contacts she could email for marketing, out of roughly 745 addresses. That was a smaller number than she hoped, and it was the true one. In practice she also removed duplicates, since some newsletter subscribers had placed orders too.
You cannot add the transaction-only and unclear groups to your newsletter. You can, for customers you have actually dealt with, plan a single email asking whether they would like to hear from you, with a clear button to join and nothing else. Anyone who clicks joins your list with a proper consent record. Anyone who does not, you leave alone.
Check this step against the PDPC's guidance before you send it, because whether even a single permission email is appropriate depends on your relationship with those contacts and what they were told. Do not send it to bought, scraped or unknown addresses under any circumstances. Mei Ling planned one for her 410 past customers and 60 enquiries, and left the lucky draw sheet out entirely.
Your finished audit lists every source you found, one row each, with the columns above filled in, and a total of contacts who can receive marketing email today. Keep it beside the consent line you wrote in lesson 1.2, because together they form the starting record for everything else in this course. Work through the steps with your own contacts now, and build the spreadsheet the activity below describes.
Produce a spreadsheet that lists every contact source, what people agreed to, how many contacts it holds and whether they can receive marketing email.
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