Email Compliance 101: Top 5 Email Compliance Acts

Email is essential to a business’s communications. It helps you nurture leads and advertise your products and services. It’s also crucial for fostering deeper connections with clients to retain them for longer and generate more conversions and sales.

You must understand and adhere to email compliance regulations to ensure you continue providing customers with value via email without compromising their privacy. Below, we discuss the top five email compliance acts by discussing:

• What is email compliance?
• Why does email compliance matter?
• Understanding key email compliance regulations
• How to create a campaign that follows email compliance regulations

What is email compliance?

Email compliance is the process of ensuring your business’s email data adheres to laws, regulations, and best practices for email marketing. These regulations are set by governing industries and federal or state governments.

Email compliance aims to protect emails, safeguard sensitive information, and authenticate senders and recipients. Failure to adhere to email compliance guidelines puts your business at risk of lawsuits, penalties, and reputational damage.

It encompasses a broad spectrum of email compliance regulations that include:

• Obtaining customer consent to send emails
• Verifying email sender identity transparency
• Providing clear unsubscribe or opt-out instructions
• Collecting and storing email addresses
• Managing the data responsibly
• Setting a timeline for email retention periods

Why does email compliance matter for digital marketing?

Email compliance dictates how to ethically send marketing emails to your email list subscribers and target audiences. Its main goal is to protect both senders and recipients’ data. However, it has many advantages for businesses, which include:

• Preventing unauthorized access or misuse of sensitive information
• Minimizing the impact of data breaches and identity theft
• Making it easier and faster to retrieve and present emails during legal disputes, audits, and investigation
• Boosting your email marketing return on investment (ROI)
• Protecting users from receiving unwanted emails and spam
• Increasing subscriber numbers and user engagement

Understanding key email compliance regulations

Email marketing remains an effective way of advertising your business and increasing brand awareness while keeping the costs low. However, failure to follow email compliance requirements may land you in trouble, and to avoid this, you must understand the different email compliance regulations available.

These compliance regulations vary depending on industries, governments, and states to protect consumers and businesses. Here’s a summary of the top five email compliance regulations:

1. GDPR

The GDPR is a European law established in 2018 to protect businesses and consumers in the European Union and the European Economic Area. These laws dictate how businesses from around the world collect, store, and share European citizens’ data via email.

It doesn’t specify a method of encrypting emails but requires information handlers to adhere to data privacy requirements. The main clauses of the GDPR that apply to email compliance include:

• Businesses must obtain explicit and informed consent from consumers before processing their data (implied consent is not enough)
• Email recipients must be made to understand how your business plans to use their data
• Individuals have a right over their data, including who can access, rectify, and erase it
• Organizations must implement a high level of cybersecurity in all their communication protocols
• You must accept and grant requests for removing data from your company’s records

Failure to comply with the GDPR email compliance requirements can attract a fine of up to 20 million euros, or an equivalent of 4% of your company’s global turnover.

2. CAN-SPAM Act

The CAN-SPAM Act is U.S. legislation introduced in 2003 that defines the rules for sending commercial emails. It’s slightly more lenient than the GDPR; for instance, the CAN-SPAM Act doesn’t require senders to get explicit consent before sending commercial emails.

However, it has clear requirements and guidelines and even more stringent fines and penalties. Here are the elements of emails that ensure compliance with the CAN-SPAM Act:

• The subject lines must be clear, descriptive, and relevant to the email’s content
• The email body should not share false or misleading information
• The email must provide a disclaimer if you mean to promote or advertise anything
• Businesses must allow recipients to opt out of emails
• You should always provide an easy way of opting out of promotional emails
• You must closely monitor third-party marketing tools to ensure compliance

Violating the CAN-SPAM Act can result in fines of up to $43,280 per email, the risk of being sued by the Federal Trade Commission or the state attorney general, and irreversible reputational damage.

3. HIPAA Act

The HIPAA Act is a data security and protection law initially introduced in the United States by the Department of Health and Human Services in 1996. It’s the standard law that protects patients’ individually identifiable information relating to doctor visits, medication details, and drug prescriptions.

It also protects health information transmitted orally, electronically, or on paper by covered entities and their business associates. Notable HIPAA rules that govern email compliance, especially for hospitals, health care clinics, insurance companies, and healthcare organizations, include:

• When storing user’s information, you must ensure it’s readily available at all times
• Regularly monitor and optimize application security protocols to protect patient information from security threats
• You commit to taking immediate action when you detect data breaches or improper use of information

4. CASL Act

The CASL Act was established in 2014 to fight against cyber threats and spam. It applies to all types of commercial electronic messaging (CEM), including emails, social media, and text messaging. The CASL Act is among the most stringent email compliance laws worldwide, and here are some of its requirements:

• Businesses must obtain explicit and implied consent from recipients before sharing any promotional content
• All commercial electronic messages must identify the sender and provide reply information
• Businesses must provide recipients with a mechanism to unsubscribe from receiving messages that must be honored within 10 days of the request
• Businesses must regularly maintain consent records

Failure to comply with the CASL Act may attract a fine of up to $1 million for individuals and $10 million for businesses. In extreme cases, businesses may face criminal prosecution or two years of imprisonment for individuals.

5. Australian Spam Act

The Australian Spam Act was established in 2003 to regulate commercial electronic messages, such as emails, instant messages, SMS, and instant messaging. Here are some provisions of the Australian Spam Act:

• Businesses must seek expressed or inferred consent before sending commercial electronic messages
• Businesses must offer a clear and easy-to-follow mechanism for recipients to unsubscribe from every message
• Every business email must include the accurate sender identification address for transparent and constant communication

Offenders of the Australian Spam Act risk a fine of up to $1.1 million for individuals and $5.5 million for businesses. Additionally, individuals can be prosecuted for a maximum of five years imprisonment for serious breaches.

How to create a campaign that follows email compliance regulations

Creating email marketing campaigns while adhering to these popular email compliance regulations involves a specific set of steps. These steps include:

• Defining your campaign goals and objectives
• Segmenting your audience to deliver more relevant emails to subscribers
• Designing your email template to ensure you always include the required information
• Testing out different email subject lines to ensure they meet compliance regulations
• Tracking email campaign results to adjust different elements that may be affecting performance

Launch compliant email marketing campaigns with WebFX

Well-set-up and compliant email marketing campaigns can drive an average of $44 return on investment (ROI) for every $1 spent. And, with our help, you cancan spare yourself the hustle of understanding and adhering to the many email compliance acts set by governments and industries.

Outsourcing your email marketing needs to a professional email marketing agency like WebFX protects and benefits both you and your potential clients. We manage your email lists and campaigns in a way that’s tailored to your business needs and adheres to email compliance guidelines.

Our email marketing experts also understand the right time to send emails to avoid spamming, which is a recurring requirement of different email compliance acts. Contact us today to discuss how we can help you adhere to email marketing compliance regulations.