With email marketing holding the palm in being surgically precise in delivering individuals directly what is needed, it is no surprise that companies consider it one of the most effective ways to communicate their brand messages to the target audience. From an exceptional ROI to brand identity reinforcement, it benefits businesses in various aspects.
However, its exciting possibilities raise new risks to users’ data and privacy. As the growing commercial interest in collecting personal information is strong, businesses must guarantee the individual’s right to confidentiality and protection. This implies following well-established legal frameworks that cover what companies can do with personal data and describe their obligations to put users in control and take appropriate measures to safeguard data.
What are these email spam laws and compliances, and how can companies adopt them in their routines to operate legally and ethically in the channel? Follow our guide to know the answers.
What Are Email Spam Laws and Compliance?
Email spam regulations are a set of rules, incentives, and penalties to encourage businesses across niches to protect individuals’ data and behave legally and ethically in communication channels. Many countries around the world have established their anti-spam pieces of legislation for email marketers. For instance, Argentina has practiced the Personal Data Protection Act since 2000, whereas Austria has had the Austrian Telecommunications Act for several decades.
Originally, these laws were invented to protect users from spam and cyber-attacks, safeguard their data and privacy, and create a healthy, transparent, and secure ecosystem in the channel. Every country has its act and a regulatory body that controls email marketers, making navigation through email spam laws and compliance challenging.
The good news is several key acts have laid the foundation for many data protection laws. Knowing and obeying them allows companies to behave legally in many countries worldwide. They are the CAN-SPAM Act, GDPR, HIPAA, CASL, and CCPA.
CAN-SPAM Act
CAN-SPAM Act stands for The Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act. Passed in 2003 in the United States, it has become one of the first major regulations controlling commercial companies and nonprofit organizations in email channels.
At its core, it is a set of rules that describe what businesses can and cannot do when emailing people and gives recipients the right to have companies stop emailing them. It is a well-structured guideline that covers all critical aspects of email communication.
Primarily, it establishes requirements for commercial messages that are not necessarily sent in bulk. It concerns all electronic mail messages with advertisement and promotional intent, whether sent to customers or other businesses.
Here are the key points from the CAN-SPAM Act:
- Companies must use truthful and non-deceptive information in the header, including “From,” “To,” “Reply-To,” routing information, domain name, and email address itself.
- Companies should use descriptive, meaningful, transparent, and non-pushy subject lines that accurately reflect the correspondence’s main body copy and purpose.
- Companies should clearly state when their messages are advertisements.
- Companies should provide full contact information, including physical address, postal address, and means of direct communication.
- Companies must provide a simple, quick, and transparent way for their subscribers to opt out of the mailing list.
- Companies must honor opt-out requests within 10 business days.
Companies are highly advised to ensure all their electronic messages obey these laws. However, if they do not have time to embed data protection principles into every digital newsletter, they must determine the primary purpose of each one. According to the CAN-SPAM Act, there are three different types of information messages:
- Commercial. They advertise or promote products, offers, events, or any other type of content.
- Transactional. They deliver information about the user’s interaction with the company to facilitate the process.
- Informative. They include purely informational content.
After deciding the type and role of each digital newsletter, companies must meet regulations with commercial ones.
CAN-SPAM Act infographic by Scannavino Law
GDPR
GDPR is an abbreviation for The General Data Protection Regulation. It was adapted in 2016 and became instantly popular among all European Union members as it provided flexibility to modify some of its provisions to adapt to each country’s specific requirements and demands. Much like the CAN-SPAM Act, it is a set of data privacy and security laws that describe requirements for organizations worldwide that want to connect with the audience in the EU.
This legislation has eleven chapters that provide clear guidelines for companies on transferring and processing personal data, protecting personal data at rest and in transit, and what rights residents have over personal data collection, use, and possession.
This regulation was so exhaustive, popular, and up-to-date that many other countries have adopted its model, including Brazil, Japan, Singapore, South Africa, and South Korea. The primary tenants of GDPR that email marketers must know and introduce are:
- Make collection of personal data lawfully, fair, and transparent. Users must know where their personal information goes and how it will be used.
- Companies may ask only for the necessary data and minimize excessive data collection.
- Every data collection must have a specified, explicit, and legitimate purpose. Companies can use subscribers’ data only for emails to which they have consented.
- Users have the right to request the removal of their data from the company’s database within 30 days.
- Companies should stick to storage limitations. They are allowed to store customer data only for a specified timeline established by the main purpose of the correspondence.
- Companies must secure their audience data from deliberate attacks or accidental breaches.
Last but not least, companies must have documentation that proves their legitimate activity in the channel. They must demonstrate the subscriber’s explicit consent, explain how the data has been used, provide data retention policy Information, and describe security measures implemented.
CCPA
CCPA is short for a California Consumer Privacy Act passed in 2018, largely influenced by GDPR. It was designed to protect California residents from data privacy criminals and improve the ecosystem in the email channels.
At the core, it obliges companies and solopreneurs serving customers in the state to provide their subscribers with explicit information on when and how their data is collected, used, and sold. This extends customer’s rights to control their data and interaction with companies.
Much like GDPR, it includes these crucial principles to enforce legitimate, honest, transparent, and ethical behavior in the channel.
- Companies must provide explicit information about how they collect and sell information about a user, including the purpose of usage.
- Companies must give free access to their disclosure and information and honor customers’ requests for data within 45 days.
- Companies must give clients the right to opt out of mailing and removing their data from their databases. Third-party data collectors must also delete customers’ information.
- Companies must devise a Privacy Policy to cover consumer rights and ways to submit requests.
It is important to note that several updates and amendments have been made to the act: Employee and Business-to-Business Exemptions in 2020, Deidentification and Aggregated Data the same year, and Consumer Request Verification in 2021.
CASL
CASL is Canada’s anti-spam legislation that went into effect in 2014. It covers rules for companies that send commercial digital newsletters to prohibit the unauthorized alteration of transmission data. Focusing on customers and an ecosystem of email channels, this act tries to minimize damaging and deceptive forms of spam, including identity theft, phishing, and spyware. It applies to individuals, incorporated and unincorporated businesses, and nonprofit organizations.
The regulation requires companies to introduce these practices in their routines:
- Obtain permission to email consumers.
- Identify the person, business, or organization sending the message.
- Provide easy and transparent ways to unsubscribe from the mailing list.
- Include a valid mailing address, telephone number, or web address for consumers to connect with the company.
HIPAA
Although HIPAA operates mostly in the healthcare sector, as it is the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, companies operating in email channels must also know it. Signed into law in 1996, it has been on guard ever since, protecting consumers from disclosure of sensitive health information and ensuring it is not shared with anyone unauthorized to see it.
The act is imperative for healthcare organizations or anyone working with healthcare information and using email channels to communicate with patients. It contains several provisions related to privacy, security, and accessibility, including the following:
- Companies must protect individuals’ medical records and personal data from being used by non-covered entities.
- Companies must safeguard digital communication to fight cyber-attacks and avoid database leakages.
- Companies must notify consumers and regulatory bodies when there is a health information security breach.
Why Should Businesses Know and Obey Email Spam Laws and Compliance?
First and foremost, disobeying regulations may lead to huge fines. According to the CAN-SPAM Act, each separate email that violates their laws is subject to penalties of up to $53,088. Similarly, GDPR calls for significant non-compliance penalties, with fines going up to 10 million EUR or 2% of annual global turnover. Other regulations do not lag; for instance, CASL’s consequences for acting spammy imply fines of up to $1M for individuals and $10M for companies.
Second, by introducing practices required by law, companies ensure their digital correspondence is legitimate, credible, and transparent. These fosters trust between email service providers and recipients, building strong relationships with both parties. Trust is crucial for consumers to follow the lead and ESPs to let emails in, granting companies with high sender scores and reputations.
Third, associating a company with legitimate activity is one of the best ways to build a strong brand identity. The more honest, respectful, and ethical a company behaves, the stronger its reputation will be. A good reputation is essential for businesses to reinforce their market positioning, stand out from the competition, and grow.
Finally, obeying and adopting regulations allows companies to participate actively in the fight against malicious actors. They help minimize spam attacks, locate hackers, and ensure a safe and secure ecosystem for consumers and companies.
How To Follow Email Spam Laws and Compliance?
Email spam laws and compliance differ from country to country, making it difficult for companies (especially those that serve international audiences) to operate in email channels legally. But there is no way out than to obey them. Businesses are obliged to follow regulations to proceed with their marketing activity. Here is some good advice for email marketers on staying compliant with email spam laws.
Note these practices mostly focus on meeting GDPR and the CAN-SPAM Act as they are the most comprehensive and widely-known email spam laws and compliance that underlie many other country-specific regulations.
Use Unspam to Locate Violations
One of the best things companies might do to ensure they meet email spam laws and compliance is to adopt a proactive strategy that implies locating faux pas and inconsistencies in their digital communication and eliminating them before reaching their subscribers.
The good news is there are professional instruments that assist companies in this matter. One of them is Unspam. It is a powerful email spam checker and deliverability testing machine that comes with multiple helpful features:
- It locates mistakes in email authentication and the technical side of email, including SPF, DKIM, DMARC, domain suffix, reverse DNS, and list-unsubscribe header.
- It inspects email content against the best email marketing practices.
- It surfaces spammy words and deceptive language.
- It analyzes the subject line to ensure it is clean, clear, and meaningful.
- It does an accessibility check.
All these small yet vital inspections provide companies with crucial knowledge to eliminate faux pas in their emails and campaigns that might cause law violations. Along with the report, companies get recommendations on how to improve their communications.
Get Explicit Permission to Send Emails
This is perhaps one of the first and most important things a company should do when introducing email marketing. Whether it is GDPR, CASL, or African Union DPF, it stipulates that people must give their permission to the company before it starts sending electronic messages to them.
Depending on the country, permission can be implied or expressed. Implied consent is usually understood through actions. For example, active members of your service or loyalty reward program provide you with implied consent. Whereas, expressed consent is usually given in words. Typically, companies ask their new subscribers to consent by entering their details into the subscription form.
Along with securing consumer consent, companies are highly advised to document and keep consent records in an internal database to provide this information to customers or regulatory bodies.
To realize this in practice, companies usually adopt a double opt-in system that requires new users to leave their personal information and approval and confirm it by clicking on the special link sent in the additional confirmation newsletter. This ensures mutual agreement and engagement with the company, which is crucial for building strong and healthy relationships.
Get Consent to Send All Sorts of Emails
Apart from getting the subscribers’ consent to become a part of the company’s mailing list, it is also crucial to get their express permission to send all kinds of digital newsletters, including promotional, transactional, informational, and behavioral.
This practice allows companies to operate in the email channel legally and prove to any regulatory body that they have full user permission to run all sorts of email campaigns. On top of that, it helps them be transparent in their relationships with customers. The latter plays a crucial role in getting positive responses from the communication. The positive response indicates the user’s engagement with the brand – a factor critical for ISPs and mailbox providers to grant companies with high sender scores and the ability to pass their spam filters smoothly.
Be Honest and Transparent in Digital Correspondence
Speaking of being transparent in communication, getting consent to send all kinds of emails is not the only thing a company must do to meet anti-spam regulations. Another important thing is to provide honest information during communication, as the CAN-SPAM Act and GDPR stipulate that companies must not include incorrect or misleading information.
This rule applies not only to body content, where companies are highly recommended to avoid salesy techniques, pushy rhetoric, and spammy-like language that create tension and force subscribers to act under pressure. It also concerns header information that, despite being mostly on the technical side of the communication, is important for establishing trustworthy relationships with customers, ISPs, and other key participants of the email ecosystem.
Here are the top recommendations that companies are advised to follow.
First and foremost, they need to use their real names or company names in the “Sender” field.
Second, they must authenticate emails. Apart from setting up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records, companies should also create BIMI records. As visual brand identification, BIMI is great for making correspondence credible and authentic on a human level.
Third, they should include brand identity, physical address, and contact details in the email.
Finally, they should create clear, meaningful, and non-deceptive subject lines. Although it is a company’s main chance to make a good first impression and compel subscribers to open an email, it does not mean it should use every tool in a persuasive game. Many laws advise email marketers to create subject lines that are honest, descriptive, and meaningful. It might inspire curiosity but without being pushy or overwhelming.
Make Opt-Out Process Simple and Quick
One of the central tenets of the CAN-SPAM Act, GDPR, and other anti-spam regulations is that the subscriber’s data belongs to them, so only they have the right to dispose of it however they want. Companies must honor their subscribers’ requests concerning their data and desire to stay on the mailing list.
Respecting users’ rights is fundamental for conducting email marketing campaigns legally and ethically in the channel. Here are the basic steps to enforce it.
First, companies should create an easy, simple, and quick way to opt out of the mailing list. Ideally, it must be a one-step process with an unsubscribe button.
Second, companies should provide easy and quick access to the unsubscribe page. The link to the unsubscribe routine must be included in every email.
Third, companies are obliged to honor opt-out requests within established periods. Depending on the regulatory act, it might be from 10 to 45 days.
Finally, companies cannot use personal data after honoring opt-out requests. In addition, they must ensure that third-party companies with whom they have shared users’ personal information also remove requested data. As a rule, this concerns those companies that outsource their email marketing efforts to other agencies or freelancers.
Conclusion
Following email spam laws and compliance is complex and multilevel. It concerns every detail of digital newsletter, from subscriber acquisition to the technical side, making companies invest their time, money, and human resources.
But there is no way around it. Companies are obliged to behave in the email channel under email spam laws and compliance. Otherwise, they might face huge fines due to law violations. Obeying the laws is the only way to avoid suspension from their activity in email channels, create strong and healthy customer relationships, and establish a brand as a trusted and reliable partner.
There are many recommendations to meet popular anti-spam regulations. The most critical are uncovering faux-pas violating laws in your current emails using Unspam, getting explicit user permission to send all kinds of emails, being honest and transparent in communication, letting subscribers opt-out and remove their data, honor requests as fast as possible, and adopt the best practices in the email channel.
