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:
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