If you want to start sending marketing emails to your customers or website leads, it’s crucial to make sure that you are following email marketing laws and regulations. There are different regulations you should be aware of whether you operate in just the United States or around the world. We’ve compiled a brief overview of the key points to email compliance, email campaign best practices, the CAN-SPAM law, and other relevant considerations for sending marketing emails. However, you’ll want to engage with your legal team to navigate what is relevant to you and get a final sign off for compliance.
United States CAN SPAM Act
Other Major Regulations for Email Marketing
(or what I like to call alphabet soup)
- CCPA: California Consumer Privacy Act
- CPRA: California Privacy Rights Act
- CASL: Canada Anti-Spam Legislation
- GDPR: EU General Data Protection Regulation
Once you understand the nuts and bolts of what you need from a legal perspective, below are some best practices to facilitate email compliance:
- Design Email Templates that are pre-approved by legal and marketing teams – Templates should be branded and include legally required content like a valid physical mailing address and link to preference center to allow the user a way to unsubscribe.
- Identify what approvals are required – There are usually different approvals for different parts of a customer-facing email: Brand and creative approval by marketing, product content or subject matter expertise approval by a product team, review of language and disclaimers by legal, audience approval by a business owner, etc. Make sure each team involved understands their role in the process and are prepared to provide feedback in a timely manner.
- QA your email and then also set-up a seed list of recipients for more QA – Of course, test and review your email before the send. AND THEN for the send, set up a list of internal users who will receive the email along with your external audience so they can confirm that the email went out exactly as expected. For example, if you forgot to remove the “Test” prefix from the subject line, you’ll know!
- Create a Go-live Checklist – Have a documented process to help make your email campaign go smoothly. View and download our Email Go-live checklist here.
Best of luck! Of course, if you want to send marketing text messages, that’s a whole different story 😊
