This is the first in a three-part introduction to e-mail marketing. In this post, I’ll show you how to build a legally compliant e-mail. In later posts I’ll talk about techniques for finding the best time to send, and discuss the happy medium between too-rare and too-frequent contacts.
Email marketing is a great way to get the word out about your product, an event or a promotion. As opposed to social media like Facebook and Twitter, it very likely that anyone with a computer and internet access has an email address where they can be reached. On the other hand, over 70% of mail on any given day is spam and the CAN-SPAM Act was created to protect consumers and create some guidelines for “good” and “bad” email.
The first step to developing an e-mail marketing campaign is making sure your campaign is legally compliant. This might seem like a “no-brainer”, but it’s incredibly important and failure to follow the rules can result in a $16,000 fine with your name on it.
The CAN-SPAM act applies to all email messages, this includes promotional (sales, special offers, etc.) and transactional emails. Since so many of our clients use email as a promotional vehicle I’ll focus on the laws for those:
- From: and To: lines need to be accurate and reflect the name of the business sending the email.
- Your subject line needs to match the content of the email (unlike those messages in your spam folder with a subject line about watches, and content about contraband pharmaceuticals).
- Your physical location must be somewhere in the email. This can be either a street address or a P.O. Box.
- You must include an unsubscribe link. Recipients must be able to easily find the link, it has to work, and it has to be Internet-based. You can’t require people to send unsubscribe requests in the mail or to call. This article has some great do’s and don’t’s for unsubscribe pages.
- Unsubscribe requests need to be processed within 10 days.
- If you are using another company for your email marketing, both parties are responsible for complying with these laws.
In general, these are fairly easy rules to abide by. Most will be addressed because they will be part of an email marketing template you’ll develop for your campaigns. For more information, check out Gmail’s Bulk Senders Guidelines which offer some additional tips on how to help your e-mail reach inbox’s instead of landing in the junk bin.
In my next post I’ll discuss the best time to send emails.
Tags: communication, e-mail, email best practices, email marketing, legal, Marketing, SPAM
