Are Your Email Newsletters Legal?

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Since so many small businesses are now sending out newsletters, it’s worth a reminder of the legislation that is in place relating to electronic communications. It’s good practice to check every now and then that your email communications are legal!

According to the Information Commissioners Office,

‘Unsolicited marketing material by electronic mail (this includes texts, picture messages and emails) should only be sent if the person has chosen to receive them, unless the email address was obtained as a result of a commercial relationship. The individual should always be given the opportunity to stop receiving the emails.’

When it comes to sending unsolicited email to business email addresses, this is a bit of a grey area, and no doubt many of us have handed over our cards at a networking event and ended up on many mailing lists! But it’s consumer addresses you have to be much more careful with, i.e anyone with a hotmail, gmail, aol email addresses etc.

Businesses cannot send unsolicited email to any kind of consumer email address, these must have opted in, e.g when purchasing a product on a website. The ICO has powers to enforce the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003. You can find out more about this on the ICO website. Organisations which have fallen foul of these laws ironically include the Labour Party and The Liberal Democrats!

Email Service Providers also have to strictly adhere to legislation regarding Spam, in fact the CAN-SPAM Act in the USA is even stricter than the EU legislation. Receiving complaints to your list could trigger an investigation or cause you to be blacklisted, so it really isn’t worth spamming just to get your name out there. Many UK businesses host their lists & send them using US providers (such as us – we use Mailchimp to send our newsletters), so you need to comply with US regulations. You can find out more about the CAN-SPAM Act on the Federal Trade Commission website.

Mailchimp has a useful article on how to avoid spam complaints, which is well worth reading: How Legitimate Marketers can Prevent Spam Complaints.

Louise and I will be discussing best practice email marketing in our next free teleseminar, ‘Email Marketing – The Next Steps’ on Thursday 8 July, so please register for the call if you’d like to learn more!