Does Your Email Newsletter Follow CAN-SPAM Guidelines?

CAN-SPAM guidelines to check-off your to-do list

Every day I look in my email inbox and see an email newsletter or promotion that is still not adhering to CAN-SPAM guidelines. They aren’t those Viagra spammers either; these are noteworthy publishers with tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of consumers on their email lists.

Breaking the rules of the CAN-SPAM Act will cost you up to $16,000 for each rule that you break. Virgin Australia (when it was known as Virgin Blue), an airline, was fined $100,000 for not unsubscribing people from their email lists when people tried to unsubscribe. Several other companies have paid millions of dollars to the FTC for not adhering to the guidelines. Even more, as of March 28, 2011, any messages you send via Facebook on behalf of your business (including wall posts) need to adhere to basic CAN-SPAM rules.

Whether there’s a glitch in your system, or your email marketing person forgot to add an unsubscribe link on an email sent out to thousands of consumers, the FTC doesn’t differentiate. Just because someone drinks and drives for the first time, and gets caught, doesn’t mean they’re not going to get a DUI. Just because you didn’t know your email was supposed to have a physical address on the bottom, doesn’t mean that you won’t get penalized. It’s up to you as a business to stay on top of the rules.

While CAN-SPAM is most aggressive towards pure commercial emails, it also applies to editorial newsletters that have an advertisement in it. If the email can be misconstrued as a commercial email, it will need to comply with CAN-SPAM guidelines. This may make you extra careful in designing your editorial newsletters so that your featured products are not misinterpreted.

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So today take a look at your email newsletters and promotions and rundown this checklist, outlined by the FTC:

• “Don’t use false or misleading header information.” This means that the email should be coming from who it says it’s coming from, either the name of your business, or the person who wrote the email.

• “Don’t use deceptive subject lines.” This one’s easy. If you’re giving away 10 living room decoration ideas for spring, don’t title the email “Win a free car for opening this email!” Sure, it’s probably get more opens, but it’ll also land you a big fine, and a whole lot of confused customers.

• “Identify the message as an ad.” In other words, don’t disguise a promotional email as an editorial email. For example, in your magazine, you’ve probably accepted ads from advertisers where the ad is simply an editorial article that subtly promotes a product. At the bottom of the page, you also print ADVERTISEMENT so that people know. Same idea here.

• “Tell recipients where you’re located.” At the bottom of your email, just include a valid mailing address for your business.

• “Tell recipients how to opt out of receiving future email from you.” You must, must, must always provide a way for people to unsubscribe from your email list. This isn’t just important for CAN-SPAM laws, but also to prevent people from hitting the “junk” or “spam” button on your emails in order to get off your email list. The more people that do that, the more you’re going to get blacklisted. Getting blacklisted on a domain like Gmail means that your emails won’t be received by anyone using a Gmail address, and that’s a pretty big hit, especially for a consumer brand.

• “Honor opt-out requests promptly.” You need to get anyone who unsubscribes off your email list within 10 days, but the link in your email that unsubscribes them needs to work for at least 30 days. That way, if someone reads your email 25 days after you sent it, they can still remove themselves from your list.

• “Monitor what others are doing on your behalf.” Some of the largest CAN-SPAM lawsuits are directed towards ad agencies, who send emails on behalf of their clients. If you have partnerships with other media or publishing companies, make sure that any messages they are sending on your behalf are CAN-SPAM compliant, because you will both be liable.

The good part about all of this is that as publishers and legitimate businesses, we don’t have anything to hide, because we’re not spammers. Unfortunately, there have been plenty of legitimate businesses who have accidentally missed a guideline here or there and paid the price. The guideline that will get you noticed quickly is your unsubscribe link, because you have thousands of subscribers who will be monitoring whether the link works, while they may not even notice if you have a physical address in your email.