Is Cold Email Legal in Switzerland? The Rules for B2B

No, not as a first touch to people who never agreed to hear from you. Under the Swiss Federal Act on Unfair Competition (UCA), Article 3 paragraph 1 letter o, sending mass advertising by email is unfair unless the recipient consented in advance. The only other route is your existing customers: people whose contact details you got in a sale and whom you told then that they could refuse such emails, written to about your own similar products or services.

The Swiss government's own BAKOM spam FAQ warns that sending advertising to people without that consent can make you liable to prosecution.

So a cold email sequence aimed at Swiss decision-makers who never opted in and never bought from you fails the rule. Email to people who opted in, and to your own customers, can work, as long as every message names you and offers a free opt-out.

This article covers Swiss law only. The broader EU and GDPR questions sit in the broader legal overview of cold email. This is not legal advice.

What does the Swiss spam rule actually say?

The Swiss spam rule sits in competition law, inside the Federal Act on Unfair Competition. So the first question is how you advertise. Privacy law comes in later, for the data behind the list.

In plain English, Article 3(1)(o) UCA says you act unfairly if you send mass advertising by telecommunication, email included, and you do any of these:

• You did not get the recipient's consent first
• You do not state who the sender really is
• You do not point to an easy, free way to refuse further messages

Customers are the one exception, covered further down.

FDPIC describes the same rule from the recipient's side. Email advertising is possible when people have explicitly opted in. That consent has to be free, informed and actively given, for example through a checkbox that was not pre-ticked. Accepting general terms and conditions does not count.

The government's SME portal puts the date on it. According to KMU.admin.ch, spam has been banned in Switzerland since 1 April 2007. An advertising email counts as spam when the recipient never gave express consent, or when the sender cannot be clearly identified.

A sales email that offers your services or a meeting about them is advertising. Calling it "outreach" or "prospecting" does not change what it is.

What does a compliant outbound plan into Switzerland look like?

It looks like a sequence that starts on LinkedIn and adds email only for the contacts the law already allows you to email. Run it in this order.

1. Split your Swiss list into three groups before anything else. Group A: customers you sold to or served. Group B: people with an explicit opt-in you can prove. Group C: everyone else. Group C is most of any prospect list, and it never gets a first-touch email.

2. Build the sending side before any email goes out, even to groups A and B. Use separate sending domains, never your invoicing domain. Warm up new mailboxes before they carry real messages, and verify the list first. The full build is in domains, inboxes and the sending setup. On every setup my team builds, SPF, DKIM and DMARC are in place before a single campaign email goes out, even to a short customer list.

3. Open group C on LinkedIn, with a profile worth checking. Your Swiss prospect will look at your profile before replying. I run LinkedIn as a channel for marathoners, not sprinters: trust gets earned over weeks, and a pitch in week 1 burns it. Article 3(1)(o) covers mass advertising by any telecommunication, not only email, and none of the official pages cited here says LinkedIn messages fall outside it. So write each LinkedIn message for one person, keep the first touches free of a pitch, and act on every "stop" at once. If you plan high-volume templated LinkedIn sequences into Switzerland, check them with a Swiss lawyer first.

4. Plan a sequence, not a single message. For group C, every touch stays on LinkedIn until the person gives you a basis for email. For how the channels fit together where email is allowed, see LinkedIn and email as one sequence. A single message almost never starts a Swiss conversation, so my team plans 5 or 6 touches per prospect, on more than one channel where the rules allow it.

5. Ask for a meeting, never for the sale. The first message offers a short call and nothing else. In every first message I write, I sell the meeting and leave the service for the call itself.

6. Keep one suppression list across every channel. An unsubscribe click, a "stop" reply by email, a "please stop" on LinkedIn: all of them go on the same list, and nobody on it gets advertising again.

A worked example. Say you run a software development company and want CFOs at Swiss insurance brokers. Your list has 400 names. 12 are past clients (group A), 0 opted in (group B), and 388 are new (group C). The 12 past clients get an email about a support plan similar to what they bought, with your name, company and a free opt-out. The 388 get a short personal note on LinkedIn, then a question about their reporting setup, then spaced follow-ups on the same channel. If one of them writes "send me the details by email", you save that message and email them. Everyone else stays on LinkedIn.

Does LinkedIn-first actually produce pipeline for a Swiss business? One of the clearest results I have is a Swiss SEO agency. My team ran LinkedIn outbound for them from two profiles with a multi-step message sequence. The first profile collected 441 profile views, 49 connections and 45 replies; the second, 567 profile views and 222 replies. Over 3 months, that came to 215 sales calls and 24 contracts.

Does the Swiss spam rule apply to B2B emails?

Yes. Nothing in the UCA text, the FDPIC page, BAKOM's FAQ or the KMU portal carves out business addresses. The rule talks about advertising and recipients, not about consumers.

That surprises founders used to markets where a corporate inbox gets lighter treatment. In Switzerland, a sales email to anna.keller@company.ch is judged the same way as one to her private address: did she consent, is she a customer, and does the email name you and offer a free opt-out?

A generic company inbox does not change the test either. Sending your offer to info@ or sales@ at a Swiss firm is still advertising by email, and publishing an address is not the same as agreeing to receive advertising at it.

What about "mass"? BAKOM is explicit that no numeric cap is set for mass advertising, and that a mailing to multiple recipients may already count. There is no safe number like "under 50 a day".

In practice, this settles the outbound question. A campaign is, by design, the same offer sent to many people over weeks. A 4-step sequence to 300 Swiss heads of IT is a mailing to multiple recipients, whatever your tool calls it.

One more rule from the KMU portal applies when you do email a group: hide the other recipients' addresses. Putting 20 prospects in the CC line exposes all of them to each other.

What is the existing-customer exception in Switzerland?

It is the one route to email advertising without fresh consent, and it is narrower than most founders hope.

The UCA text and the FDPIC together set three conditions:

1. The person is a customer of your company, which the FDPIC ties to a sale that was made or a service that was provided
2. The email is about your own similar products or services
3. You told the customer at the time of the sale that they could refuse such emails, every email still offers a free opt-out, and they have not used it

The FDPIC adds a detail that cuts out a lot of lists: just opening an online account does not count. Free trials with no purchase, newsletter forms, webinar registrations and event badge scans all fall outside the exception unless a sale or service actually happened.

Two duties apply to every email, customer or not. BAKOM says the sender must be clearly identifiable and must not be hidden or falsified. Each advertising email must carry a "remove me" option, and anyone who uses it must come off the list. The FDPIC describes the same opt-out as an easy, no-cost refusal, usually an unsubscribe link.

Here is a customer email that follows those rules. Say your firm built a tenant portal for a property management company in Basel last year, and you now offer a monthly support plan.

Subject: Support plan for your tenant portal

Hi Martina,

Your tenant portal has been live for 14 months. Most portals that size start needing small fixes and updates every month, and paying for them one invoice at a time gets slow.

We now run a fixed monthly support plan for systems we built. Would a 20-minute call next week help you decide if it fits?

Lukas

Signed with full name, role, company name and business address.

Don't want emails like this? Reply "stop" or click here, free of charge, and we will remove you.

That email passes because Martina bought, the plan is close to what she bought, the sender is clear and the opt-out costs nothing. Send the same email to the head of facilities at a Basel company that never bought from you, and none of the exception applies.

How does the revised FADP fit around business contact data?

The spam rule decides whether you may send the email. The revised data protection act (FADP) decides how you handle the contact data behind it. You need to pass both, and passing one never covers the other.

According to the KMU portal's guide to the new act, Swiss companies have had to comply since 1 September 2023. The FDPIC's legal basis page confirms the previous act was valid until 31 August 2023 and that the revised FADP replaced it.

Four points from the KMU portal matter for an outbound list:

Being outside Switzerland does not take you out of scope. DLA Piper's summary of Swiss data protection law notes that the FADP has extraterritorial reach and covers processing with an effect in Switzerland, even when it was started abroad. So a London or New York team building a list of Zurich CFOs should plan as if the act applies to that list.

Who acts on unfair email advertising, and what can it cost?

First, the rule carries a criminal sanction. Article 23 of the UCA makes wilful unfair competition, on complaint, punishable by a custodial sentence of up to 3 years or a monetary penalty. For email spam, BAKOM gives the maximum as "3 years in prison or fines of up to CHF 1,080,000". This sits in the unfair competition act, so it is a different exposure from a data protection fine.

Second, the federal government can act itself. SECO, the State Secretariat for Economic Affairs, says it "exercises the federal government's right to take legal action against unfair business practices". Spam is an unfair practice under the UCA, so it is the kind of conduct that remit covers, although the page does not say how often SECO acts on email advertising.

Third, recipients have their own lever. The FDPIC's data protection FAQ says a person who gets unwanted advertising can ask the controller for information under Article 25 of the data protection act, including the available information about where their personal data came from. If the company refuses, the person can take the claim to a civil court.

That third point is the one I would plan around. A Swiss prospect who replies "where did you get my address?" is asking a question you are obliged to answer. Record the source of every contact in your CRM on the day you add it: the database, the event, the referral, the customer contract.

Should you email Swiss prospects at all, or start on LinkedIn?

Run each Swiss contact through these rules, in this order:

• If they bought from you or you provided a service to them, email them about your own similar products or services, with your identity and a free opt-out in every message.
• If they explicitly opted in and you can show it, email them within what they agreed to.
• If they only created an account, downloaded something or met you once, treat them as new prospects. No email yet.
• If they are new, open on LinkedIn and keep email out until one of the first two rules applies.
• If anyone opts out, on any channel, stop all advertising to them and add them to the suppression list.

For markets with strict prior-consent rules, my team's position is already set: no cold email to Germany, Austria or the Czech Republic without a compliant basis, and LinkedIn as the channel instead. Switzerland's rule points the same way for a first touch, and the Swiss SEO agency result above shows what a LinkedIn-only campaign can produce for a Swiss business. If you are weighing the channels for other markets too, the trade-offs are in cold email or LinkedIn first.

I never let email be the first touch with a Swiss prospect: the warm email comes after a LinkedIn touch, and only once the person has given a basis for it.

If you want a second opinion on starting Swiss outreach on LinkedIn instead of email, book a call. I am happy to answer questions, though not legal ones.