Canning the Spamming

June 3rd, 2008 at 09:42am Pam Maher

So you’ve created a great email newsletter. You’ve built your email lists. You’re ready to send it out. But take a step back and consider whether you’ve offered an “opt-out” option. Not only does including an opt-out make good marketing sense but, under the CAN-SPAM Act, it’s also federal law.

We’ve been doing enewsletters for years - both for clients and for our own company - and we sometimes sign up our clients and prospects because we think they’ll find the content relevant to what we’re working on for them or where they’re at in their business. But occasionally, someone will opt-out.

And that’s OK.

From a marketing point of view, it’s better to have subscribers opt-out than be annoyed with having received it and not know how to stop them from coming.

Perhaps more importantly is that not including an opt-out option is now a federal crime subject to up to $11,000 in fines every time it happens. In 2003, the federal government passed the CAN-SPAM act, which requires all commercial emails - those email messages “whose primary purpose is advertising or promoting a commercial product or service, including content on a Web site” - to include an opt-out procedure. Read more about the CAN-SPAM act here.

Updates to CAN-SPAM - On Tuesday, May 13, of this year, the FTC updated the CAN-SPAM laws to talk about the nature of the “sender” of promotional emails. Read more here.

Moral of the story - giving clients and subscribers an opt-out option is easy and the law.

Entry Filed under: Rules & Regs, Database marketing, Internet communications