The Stack
Smartlead
Open rate is the number to ignore here: privacy protection invents opens, image blocking hides real ones, and scanners fire their own.
- Category
- Cold email sending
- Where the data sits
- EU and United States
What you learn in the first month
We watch replies and what happens after them rather than the headline open rate. Tracking pixels are noisy, Apple Mail Privacy Protection creates opens that never happened, image blocking hides ones that did, and security scanners trigger events of their own. The other number we set by hand is volume: around three inboxes per domain and 20 to 25 emails per inbox per day. When a campaign needs more, we add domains and inboxes instead of pushing the existing ones harder. Nothing goes wide at once either. Infrastructure goes up in stages, we test broadly, and then move volume onto what works.
We earn a commission if you sign up through some of the links on this page. What each tool teaches you is written from running it, and the hosting answer is the same whether we earn on it or not. Where there is no link, there is no programme we are part of.
Where the data sits
Mixed, with no EU-only option. Smartlead's data processing addendum states that it stores and processes EU and UK data in data centres both inside and outside the European Union, and lists nine possible countries. The only region it names specifically is the Sydney region of Amazon Web Services. European transfers rely on standard contractual clauses with the UK addendum.
Worth saying plainly: hosting outside the EU can still be GDPR compliant. It is not the same thing as EU data residency, and which one you need depends on who you sell to. What the law actually asks of you is a separate question with a separate answer.