Having just celebrated the three year anniversary of The CAN-SPAM Act, it seemed like an appropriate time for a little refresher course!

The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, which stands for The Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act, became effective on January 1, 2004. As quoted from the Federal Trade Commission Fact Sheet for Businesses, the provisions laid out in the Act apply to those emails “whose primary purpose is advertising or promoting a commercial product or service, including content on a Web site.”

Below are the four main requirements set forth in the Act:

1. An email may not contain false or misleading header information. This means the email’s “From Address” and routing information must be accurate and must identify from where the email originated.

2. Subject lines must not be deceptive, and must not mislead the recipient about the contents of the email.

3. Emails must contain an easy way for the recipient to opt-out of receiving future emails from the sender. Please note, this opt-out mechanism must be present on both HTML and Text versions of your emails. This can be easily accomplished by using the following snippets in Publicaster:

HTML Version: To unsubscribe from future emails from XYZ, [~Optout~]click here[~EndOptout~]

Text Version: To unsubscribe from future emails from XYZ, go to: [~Optout~]

4. Commercial emails must be clearly identified as an advertisement or solicitation. In addition, the sender’s physical mailing address must be included on all emails. Again, this must be on both HTML and Text versions.

To read more about The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, go to the FTC’s Fact Sheet for Businesses.

Celebrate the Act’s third anniversary by checking over your emails to ensure they are CAN-SPAM compliant!

When it comes to Spam, too many companies focus on CAN-SPAM compliance alone, thinking that as long as they meet the Federal requirements, Spam complaints won’t interfere with their email marketing success.

Not so!

The law is easy to comply with….the real challenge is avoiding the perception of Spam. Most Spam complaints don’t occur because a company fails to abide by the laws, they occur because the recipient is annoyed, surprised or inconvenienced by an email to the point that they fight back! This is particularly true with AOL users, and other ISPs who make Spam complaining very easy.

A new article in eMarketer does a nice job proving this point, with some good stats to support their claims. Two key findings from the recent holiday season were that more people were reporting emails as Spam than a year ago, and more people said they received an overwhelming increase in emails than during the previous holiday season.

Not only does this indicate a growing frustration and impatience with unwanted/unexpected email, but it also indicates that companies need to work harder to earn the trust and desire to be heard from!

The article reinforces, with hard facts, that the single most important aspect of successful email marketing is…..TRUST! Once a recipient trusts the sender, they are very likely to open the email, but more importantly they are very unlikely to report an email as Spam!

Check out the full article by clicking here