The new
Anti Spam Law (officially the
Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act) comes into force from 5 September 2007 which is great. What I have noticed over the last few weeks is how few emails are actually complying with this right now. Checking my inbox, the last emails from Trademe, Ticketek and Air NZ would have not complied with the new Act. So if you want to do one better than the big boys here are the four points you need to go through, that should ensure you will comply with the new Anti Spam act.
The four key requirements for compliance;
- Consent – you must have express, inferred or deemed consent. Express consent is straightforward; your customer has given a direct indication that they consent to receiving your message. Inferred consent, this arises from the circumstances around the relationship. Here you need to be able to demonstrate that through the business relationship it is normal to keep customers up to date through newsletters. Deemed consent, this arises where you might publish your email in a business capacity but not have a “no spam” statement. Anyone can send emails to this address but they need to be relevant to this business.
- Unsubscribe facility – all commercial emails will need an unsubscribe link.
- Contact details – all commercial emails will need to include contact information for the person who authorised the sending of the message and include how that person can be contacted.
- Address-harvesting software – you can’t use address harvesting software (which searches the internet for email addresses to compile mailing lists). If you’re a normal business you won’t have to worry about this. This is in there to specifically target spammers.
These requirements wont be an issue for most companies. From my quick survey the main issue people will have to address is point three – contact details. A lot of commercial email sent does not come from a person or have a person identified in the email.
My recommendation would be to be brave and have the spokesperson for your company send the email. Have it go from a proper email address that your customers can reply to. You might actually learn something from your customers! For very large companies this might not be practical but simple email rules can handle this; just set your email to forward every message with the defined subject to go someone in the team to scan and reply to these messages on your behalf. It’s not difficult stuff and your customers will appreciate it.
So to comply with the Anti Spam Act, make sure you have express consent, have a clear automated unsubscribe link and make sure you have a person identified with contact details in your email, do this and you should be fine. At the end of the day while the fines are large ($200,000 for an individual and $500,000 for an organisation) the cost to comply with this is very low.
If you have any doubts talk to your email marketing company or feel free to contact me.