Are you concerned about how to make your email campaigns compliant with current laws in your country or region?
Do you wonder how to balance effective email marketing strategies while adhering to legal requirements?
If you’re looking for answers to any of these questions, you’ve come to the perfect place. This guide is here to help you with email compliance. It offers clear and practical insights to ensure your email efforts are successful and fully legal.
What is email compliance, and why does it matter?
Email compliance is about following laws and rules that guarantee your email messages are legal and respectful of recipients’ privacy. It also involves protecting sensitive information like personal health data.
Key aspects of email compliance include:
- obtaining explicit consent from recipients before sending commercial emails,
- respecting opt-out requests promptly,
- and avoiding false or misleading information.
Compliance is crucial for maintaining a good sender reputation, but there is more to the story – it’s key to avoiding legal penalties.
If businesses don’t care about their email compliance, they may face hefty fines, which can be substantial enough to impact their financial stability. Thus, in some cases, legal issues might lead to long-term damage to the company’s reputation and customer trust.
Furthermore, non-compliance can affect the company’s relationships with email service providers and regulatory bodies, lead to the blacklisting of the company’s email domain, and affect all future email communications.
Email service providers often help businesses manage compliance thanks to offering features like double opt-in methods, email authentication, and regular audits – such options can ensure data privacy and protection.
The most important pieces of legislation on email compliance
Email compliance is a crucial aspect of email marketing and digital communication. It adheres to various laws and regulations designed to protect consumer rights and contribute to the responsible use of email for commercial purposes.
These laws can vary by region and have specific requirements.
Among the most popular and significant pieces of legislation are:
- the CAN-SPAM Act in the United States,
- the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the European Union,
- and Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL).
Let’s check them out.
CAN-SPAM Act
The CAN-SPAM Act is one of the email compliance laws in the United States that governs email communication.
It stands for Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing. Enacted in 2003, it’s designed to give recipients the right to stop receiving unwanted emails.
About CAN-SPAM Act:
- It applies to all commercial electronic messages, which are defined as any electronic mail message primarily intended for the commercial advertisement or promotion of a commercial product or service.
- Key provisions of the CAN-SPAM Act include the prohibition of creating deceptive subject lines so they don’t mislead and accurately reflect the content of the email.
- It prohibits confusing headers and requires the email’s header information – including the “From,” “To,” and “Reply-To” fields – to be precise and identify the person or business who initiated the message.
- Moreover, it tells that recipients must have an easy way to opt out of receiving future emails. This opt-out process must be honored promptly by the email sender.
- Every email must contain the physical postal address of the sender.
- Violators of the CAN-SPAM Act may be subject to penalties, including fines for abusing commercial emails.
GDPR
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a comprehensive data protection law in the European Union that came into effect in May 2018. It has significantly impacted email marketing and communication by prioritizing customer data privacy and consent.
About GDPR:
- It applies to all organizations operating within the EU and to organizations outside of the EU that offer goods or services in this area or monitor the behavior of EU residents.
- It requires explicit consent for processing personal data. In the context of email marketing, this means users must actively opt-in. The sender must oblige with unsubscribe requests.
- Individuals have the right to access their personal data and can request its deletion.
- It calls for the integration of data protection measures in the development of business processes.
- It demands organizations to report certain types of data breaches to relevant authorities and, in some cases, to the affected individuals.
- Organizations can face significant fines for non-compliance, up to €20 million or 4% of the company’s annual global turnover. However, not all violations of GDPA lead to financial penalties.
CASL
Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) is a regulatory framework that governs the sending of commercial electronic messages (CEMs) within, to, or from Canada. It was enacted in 2014, and it’s one of the strictest anti-spam compliance laws in the world.
About CASL:
- CASL requires explicit or implied consent for sending CEMs, including emails, SMS, social media, or instant messaging – these are stringent requirements for all communication forms.
- It says that senders must identify themselves and provide contact information in their messages. Besides your legal name, you should include the street address, your post office box and other relevant contact details.
- Every message must include a straightforward and easily accessible way for recipients to opt out of future messages. Most email platforms offer this feature by default, especially in cold emails.
- Organizations must keep records of consent (either implied or explicit) as proof of compliance. So, when you have someone express consent, store this for the designated number of business days to comply with privacy laws.
- Violating CASL can lead to severe penalties, including fines of up to $1 million for individual people and $10 million for businesses.
- This regulation applies if a message is sent to or from Canadian devices. As a result, it’s relevant for global email campaigns targeting Canadian recipients. This is important when running communication for businesses reaching out to global audiences.
How to improve your email compliance
Improving email compliance is not just about following the email regulations or not getting a fine.
Here, it’s more about building long-lasting relationships and trust among your email recipients and ISPs, and taking care of your business email operations, all the while sending relevant content and bypassing every spam filter out there.
That’s why it’s time to learn some practical and simple ways to improve your email compliance, not limited to regulatory requirements.
Get permission before sending emails
The foundation is getting permission to send emails to avoid the legal consequences of an angry mailing list. You need to ask your audience if they’re cool with receiving your emails. This can be as simple as including a sign-up form on your website or during a purchase process. When they express consent, you can start reaching out.
The key to email compliance rules is transparency – let people know what they’re signing up for, whether it’s a newsletter, promotions, or updates. Explain the benefits they’ll receive from your emails, but be honest here. The email subject line and the email body should clearly state what the user is getting.
This will build a foundation of trust and ensure your audience is interested in your content.
Remember, quality over quantity always wins in email marketing. Most email marketers prefer higher email engagement than thousands of email chains that no one reads.
It’s better to have a smaller list of interested people and email accounts than a huge group of unengaged contacts. After all, the goal is to create a community of interested people who are waiting for your emails, not a race to see what company has the biggest audience.
Use double opt-in
Double opt-in takes permission one step further and it’s one of the most important email marketing practices out there. It’s a great example of confirming the willingness to be in touch with you and shows that a person wants to join your email list.
So, when someone signs up for your list, send them a confirmation email, and a follow-up, and ask them to click a link to verify their subscription. This method ensures the email address is valid and correct and that the owner is genuinely interested in receiving your emails.
It also reduces the likelihood of spam complaints and improves the quality of your email list.
It may seem like an extra step, a necessary one. Well, not exactly, according to many email marketing regulations.
Double opt-in is a powerful tool for those who want to build a dedicated audience. So, instead of seeing it as just another step on the long road to success, think of it as getting an RSVP for your party that confirms the guest will come to it.
Validate your lists before sending out emails
Likewise, you can’t forget about email validation and sending messages to active addresses.
When it comes to validation and keeping your email list clean, you can use a tool like Bouncer that won’t let any risky email address get into your lists.
Bouncer checks and scans your mailing list and makes sure everyone who’s coming in has a valid email address. It helps reduce bounce rates and protects the sender’s reputation. It also works in real-time and offers features like syntax, domain, and SMTP checks.
Thanks to Bouncer, you will send emails only to active, valid addresses, improve deliverability, and respect your audience’s inbox.
But more importantly, Bouncer will help you operate email compliances and stay out of spam folders. It’s a secure tool that follows policies, works seamlessly across multiple countries and languages, confirms the legitimacy of the email’s domain name, and with all of it, still boosts your email marketing metrics.
So if you’re looking for a comprehensive system that can improve your emails in many areas, it’s time for you to try Bouncer.
Give explicit options to opt-out
The next step is about offering clear opt-out options. They align with legal requirements and are a sign of respect and transparency. They also show you won’t force clients to stay with you at all costs. It’s not just abiding by industry standards, it means following global anti-spam standards too.
People’s interests change, and if they decide your emails are irrelevant, they would like to easily and quickly say goodbye to you. If you allow for that through an unsubscribe option, you will still maintain a positive relationship and give clients control over their preferences.
In the end, you want your guests to stay with you because they value your content, not because they can’t find the exit door, right?
Thus, it shouldn’t be a treasure hunt to unsubscribe. Instead, it should be as easy to unsubscribe as it is to subscribe. That’s why you must check if your unsubscribe link is easy to find in every email. This might be a simple text with a link at the bottom of your emails.
Monitor blacklists
Think of blacklists as warning signals – if your email gets there, it means it’s been marked as spam by users or email providers. So, if it’s too late and you have already found yourself in this place, it’s time to clean up your act.
You may clean up your email list, change your email content, or adjust how you collect email addresses.
Regularly monitor what happens with your emails. Also, review your email practices and make sure you’re following compliance rules. Thanks to this, you will maintain a good sender reputation, enhance deliverability, and guarantee your emails are welcomed in your recipients’ inboxes. By respecting this type of email rules, you ensure better performance of your email marketing campaigns.
It’s a proactive measure to maintain the health and effectiveness of your email communications.
Use email authentication
Email authentication helps verify that the email comes from you, not an impersonator. In other words, it tells email service providers that your email is legit and not a spammer in disguise.
Set up SPF (Sender Policy Framework), DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail), and DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance) records. These are like ID checks that tell email providers and recipients that your emails are authentic.
This is more than a must in a world where phishing and spam are rampant through bulk email campaigns. Moreover, it can improve email deliverability and protect your brand’s reputation too.
Segment and target your audience
And our last proposition – segmenting and targeting your audience, which helps you send emails to the right people. It involves dividing your email list into smaller groups based on specific criteria, like location, interests, purchases, or past behavior.
This move allows you to tailor your content to suit different segments of people and makes your emails more relevant.
Here, the most important thing is to show you understand and cater to your audience’s diverse needs and interests. Also, personalized and relevant emails are more likely to be welcomed and less likely to be marked as spam.
For instance, you wouldn’t send the same email to women interested in swimming and those interested in car repair.
Such effective segmentation leads to higher metrics and better results as your audience receives the content they need.
Improve your email communications
And here we are – with all the steps to improve your email compliance that go beyond email laws.
With our tips, you’ll send relevant, compliant emails, secure, and engaging messages and improve your email marketing efforts.
But before you start running email marketing campaigns, you need to prepare for it, namely – check what laws apply to you. Without adhering to email marketing compliance regulations, you may face many problems with this form of communication.
If, however, you prepare carefully, you will avoid the risks and keep the trust of your customers.
Maintain compliance laws and make your messages reach intended recipients. Use our tool, Bouncer, and change the way you work with your marketing emails.
