What You Need To Know About Canada’s Anti-Spam Act
By Anna Johnson on May 9th, 2009MarketingSherpa has published a useful article summarizing the key differences between an anti-spam bill being introduced into the Canadian parliament and the United States’ CAN-SPAM Act.
If you market to Canadians, you’ll want to know what is – and isn’t allowed – under Canadian law, so I’d encourage you to read MarketingSherpa’s article to get an introduction to the proposed legislation.
Essentially, if you want to send promotional or commercial emails to Canadians you’ll need to ensure you have their permission, give them the ability to unsubscribe, honor their requests to unsubscribe… and be prepared to be sued by both individuals and the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission if you don’t comply with the law.
If you adopt email marketing best practice you should probably be fine (of course, that’s not legal advice!). Among other things, I suggest you:
1. Only send emails to people who have signed up to receive those specific emails.
To be on the safe side, use a confirmed optin system whereby you automatically send a subscriber an email requiring them to click on a confirmation link before they’re added to your mailing list.
2. Have an unsubsribe link at the bottom of each email and make sure it works indefinitely.
Apparently the CAN-SPAM Act requires unsubscribe links to be active for 30 days, while the Canadian bill requires them to be active for 60 days. With today’s technology – especially that used by reputable email service providers – it shouldn’t be a big deal to ensure such links work whenever someone clicks on them in order to unsubscribe.
3. Honor unsubscribes immediately.
Apparently, the U.S. and Canadian laws respectively require Internet marketers to remove ‘unsubscribers’ from their lists within 10 business days (SPAM-CAN Act) and 10 days (the Canadian bill) of the unsubscribe request.
Again, if you’re using one of the reputable email service providers, someone should be removed from your list as soon as they click on the unsubscribe link.
Otherwise, or if they’ve manually sent you a request to be removed from your list, you should do this as soon as you receive the request.
4. Regularly ‘clean’ your database.
Regularly remove bounced email addresses, and email addresses for which your emails are continually marked as spam, from your database.
