If you are doing email marketing or are planning to engage into it, you should know that sending emails for the commercial purposes is regulated by a US Congress enacted law.  The name of the law is CAN-SPAM Law, abbreviation for Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Law. It is passed in 2003 and officially implemented in January 2004.  It is important that you know that provisions of this law when you are into email marketing.  The penalty for offence against this law is up to $11,000.00.

The part of the law that is related with email marketing covers those emails sent for the purpose of promoting or advertising a product, a service or a web site.  If you have a web site that sells e-books for example and you include the URL of your web site in your email, your email fall under the commercial kind of email.  This is the kind of emails regulated by US Free Trade Association.

The CAN-SPAM Law states that you can send unsolicited marketing emails but you have to clearly label your message as such.  Unsolicited emails are emails that you send to recipients who did not choose to receive your emails.  If you send an unsolicited email in which you are selling your product, you should indicate in your email subject that it is offering a product.

To be sure of not being spammed or blacklisted though, many experts in email marketing advise the strategy of permission-based email marketing.  It is sending commercial emails only to those addresses whose owners expressed desire of receiving emails from you.  This will not only ensure that your emails will not be spammed, this will also help you target your customers.  Only those customers who are interested in your product will be the ones who will receive your commercial emails.

Either case, when sending a marketing email, make sure that you don’t use misleading subject lines because this is an offense under the CAN-SPAM Law.  When you type, “Hello, there, friend, open to know Jesus more” in the subject line of your email but your content is a catalogue of your cosmetic products, then you are deceiving recipients.  This is prohibited under the law.

Your commercial emails should also include a mechanism for the recipient to opt out of you email list if he/she does not want to continue receiving your emails.  You should include an instruction on how a recipient can “unsubscribe”.  You can include the lines, “If you do not want to receive emails from me, reply with “Unsubscribe” as your subject line”.  If you receive this opt-out email, the law gives you only 10 days to take the recipient’s address out of your email list.

Another provision of the CAN-SPAM law that is relevant to email marketing is its prohibition of selling your email list to other email marketers. You are also not allowed to use email lists that you have acquired from other email marketers.  You build your own email list not by buying email list but by growing it on your own either by online or offline gathering of email addresses.

It is therefore vital to choose the right email marketing solution which complies with the law!

Email marketing is starting to become the number one choice for a cheap and effective way of reaching customers instantly.  But doing email marketing without the knowledge of the law can backfire and may ruin your business.  So, while being more adept at it, your also need to constantly update yourself regarding the legal side of email marketing.