It is less than one week before the new Canadian Anti Spam Legislation, CASL, comes into effect. Among other things this new act regulates how email and text messaging is used when contacting the public. The public in this case includes all consumers whether in a consumer or business context. It governs all commercial electronic messages with a very limited number of exceptions.
Many businesses are taking steps to make their use of email compliant with the provisions of the act. In its simplest sense what the act says is you must have prior explicit permission to send emails for marketing purposes to consumers. There are provisions which provide for some options on this but essentially to be compliant you must have a person's permission to use their email on your list.
Anyone who is active in several email lists will have started to get messages from the list holders related to CASL. These companies are attempting to proactively clean their lists and ensure that they not only have permission to use email addresses but that they have the proof that they got that permission. The burden for proof of permission lies with the company sending the email so a process which collects and stores this proof is important.
You can do the same thing to make your list compliant and follow the lead of the companies that have already started to work on this. The bigger your list the more important an early start is, but all businesses will benefit from doing the work. One side benefit will be that when you send out messages saying you are getting compliant you indicate to your list members that you are professional and considerate of your list members when dealing with them. Doing this early shows that you are serious about controlling spam and that you are considerate of those who receive your material.
How to go about it
There are several ways that companies are approaching this process. Some are sending a broadcast message to all those on their list(s) asking for them to click a button to indicate they wish to continue to receive information from the sender. in most cases this button is linked to a landing page which asks people to respond positively by checking a check box and then submitting the response. This response is recorded by the software and becomes the record of permission being granted.
If you use this process be ready to keep reducing your initial list by those who have indicated their permission. You can then resend another message to the remaining list to keep trying to resign your list members. This will take several resends to capture all who do wish to continue to receive your information simply because people will tend to procrastinate over the decision.
Another way some companies are approaching the process is to include in all of their regular messages, newsletters, promotions etc. an information section which references the CASL and requesting viewers to click to renew their participation. They then get routed to a landing page like above and become part of the sign up process. This has the benefit of linking the decision to resign with a sample of the content they have been used to seeing and should lead to a better renewal rate.
Finally, some companies (probably the majority at this point) are just delaying to do anything relying on the provisions in the act that give a period of grace before all use of electronic communication has to be compliant. This stay the course route is a bit like just hoping it will go away or not become a big issue. I think you can get away with this for awhile but eventually you need to bite the bullet and get your process cleaned up.
The Canadian Anti Spam Legislation is designed to make the use of electronic messaging better for everyone by attempting to remove as much as possible information not expressly sought by recipients. It is going to be interesting to see how successful this is in reducing the unwanted material without making it too hard for legitimate usage to be undertaken.
If you have questions about the act IT World Canada recently published a quick slide show with answers to many of the most common questions that businesses have. You can access this short article here. It may help you better understand when and what you need to do to respond to the legislation.
Taking action to ensure that your use of electronic communication is done in a way that responds to the act is a sensible and smart thing to do. After all, the purpose of sending electronic messages to customers and potential customers is to help to build your business and rapport with your recipients. Demonstrating that you are doing this in a manner which avoids spamming is a good business decision and something you most likely want to do sooner, not later.
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