Regulations in email marketing

Honor your patrons rights, avoid fines, and maintain your reputation

Consent and opt-in

Before you send any emails to your patrons, remember it is best-practice to get explicit consent and double opt-in.

Explicit consent is clearly and specifically asking if you can send marketing emails, and the individual gives you their email address and agrees.

Double opt-in is when you send them an email with a link to confirm permission to continue receiving marketing emails from your company.

CAN-SPAM Act of 2003

An American law to control all electronic, commercial messages.

Each separate email in violation of the CAN-SPAM Act is subject to penalties of up to $51,744, therefore non-compliance can be costly toward your company's financials and reputation.

Don’t use false or misleading header information.

Your “From,” “To,” “Reply-To,” and routing information – including the originating domain name and email address – must be accurate and identify the person or business who initiated the message.

The use of deceptive subject lines is illegal.

The subject line must accurately reflect the content. Also, if the message contains sexually-oriented material, there must be the phrase “SEXUALLY-EXPLICIT” as the first 19 characters in the subject line.

Clearly identify the message as an advertisement.

The law gives you a lot of leeway in how to do this, but you must disclose clearly and conspicuously that your message is an advertisement.

Your message must include your valid physical postal address.

This can be your current street address, a post office box you’ve registered with the U.S. Postal Service, or a private mailbox you’ve registered with a commercial mail receiving agency established under Postal Service regulations.

Tell recipients how to opt out of receiving future marketing email from you. improve clarity.

Your message must include a clear and conspicuous explanation of how the recipient can opt out of getting marketing email from you in the future. Craft the notice in a way that’s easy for an ordinary person to recognize, read, and understand. Creative use of type size, color, and location can improve clarity. Give a return email address or another easy Internet-based way to allow people to communicate their choice to you. You may create a menu to allow a recipient to opt out of certain types of messages, but you must include the option to stop all marketing messages from you. Make sure your spam filter doesn’t block these opt-out requests.

Remember that subscribers and members can opt out of marketing emails, too.

Recipients of emails from a sender that runs a subscription service or membership program still have the right to opt out of marketing messages from you. While you don’t need to get members’ consent to send them marketing emails, subscribers and members don’t lose their ability to opt out of marketing emails from you simply because they have a subscription or membership. Before sending a message without an unsubscribe link to subscribers or members, be sure that the primary purpose of the message fits within one of the five categories of “transactional or relationship” message set out in the Act. If it doesn’t, you need to include a way for recipients to opt out of further marketing messages from you.

Honor opt-out requests promptly.

Any opt-out mechanism you offer must be able to process opt-out requests for at least 30 days after you send your message. You must honor a recipient’s opt-out request within 10 business days. You can’t charge a fee, require the recipient to give you any personally identifying information beyond an email address, or make the recipient take any step other than sending a reply email or visiting a single page on an Internet website as a condition for honoring an opt-out request. Once people have told you they don’t want to receive more messages from you, you can’t sell or transfer their email addresses, even in the form of a mailing list. The only exception is that you may transfer the addresses to a company you’ve hired to help you comply with the CAN-SPAM Act.

Monitor what others are doing on your behalf.

The law makes clear that even if you hire another company to handle your email marketing, you can’t contract away your legal responsibility to comply with the law. Both the company whose product is promoted in the message and the company that actually sends the message may be held legally responsible.