Collecting email addresses

First of all, if the email collected are composed like info@company.com these are not considered as personal data under GDPR, so the answer is yes.On the contrary, if you are planning to collect email like name.surname@company.com these email addresses are considered as personal data under GDPR. You can process personal data using the legitimate interest as legal ground only to introduce your company to a potential client with the so-called cold email. 

There must be relevance between the sender and the recipient of the email. For example, I can send a cold email to introduce a company that offers a selection of employees to an HR Manager, but I cannot do the same to the Head of Logistics. The reason is that once the email address is published on the company website, the owner consent to be contacted for reasons connected to the role in the company.Of course, in the cold email, you can add a button to subscribe to a newsletter and receive information on products, offers, and so on.

To know how to ensure email marketing compliance you can read this article:

• Email marketing in the era of GDPR – How to ensure compliance? https://advisera.com/eugdpracademy/blog/2019/05/27/gdpr-and-email-marketing-rules-for-compliant-campaigns/

If you need to understand how to manage email addresses under GDPR, you can consider enrolling in our free online training EU GDPR Foundations Course: https://advisera.com/training/eu-gdpr-foundations-course//