The CAN-SPAM Act
In 2003, the U.S. government passed the CAN-SPAM Act, a law intended to reduce the amount of spam on the Internet. The CAN-SPAM Act sets national standards for the sending of commercial e-mail, and requires the Federal Trade Commission to enforce those standards. (CAN-SPAM is an acronym for Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing.)
The CAN-SPAM Act provides certain guidelines for legitimate e-mail marketing ventures, including unsolicited e-mail marketing offers and e-newsletters. As a marketer, you need to be aware of and follow these guidelines. The CAN-SPAM Act states that each marketing or advertising e-mail you send out must include the following features in order to be considered legitimate:
1. You must clearly identify yourself and your company in the e-mail. In other words, you must say who you are and what your company does.
2. You must provide a physical address for yourself or your company. If someone wants to write to you to be taken off your mailing list, they should be able to do so as an alternative.
3. You must give recipients an easy opt-out for your e-mail list if they don’t want to receive e-mails from you. This can be a link to an “unsubscribe” page (e.g., “If you no longer wish to receive e-mails from this company, please unsubscribe here”) or just simple instructions (e.g., “If you wish to unsubscribe from this newsletter, please send us a reply with unsubscribe in the subject line”).
4. You must promise to no longer send e-mails to those who have opted out.
As a marketer, I would also recommend that you use only permission-based e-mail mailing lists, on which the potential customers have actually opted in to receiving e-mails from you. With permission-based lists, customers must either sign up to receive offers directly from you (e.g., through your website) or elect to receive third-party offers from you through another marketing organization they trust. For example, a potential customer may have subscribed to a magazine where the signup form included the option for them to receive third-party offers through the magazine’s subscription list.