Last week, the FTC approved several new rule provisions under the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. Read the press release or download the full article (PDF). If you don’t have time to sort through the comments and legalese, below is a brief overview.
These new provisions were included largely to clarify the meanings of and intents of existing rules, so not too much has changed. There were a few clarifications that dealt more with the technicalities of the Act; however, there are two main changes to concentrate on. One of the biggest additions was an augmentation to ensure that subscribers could easily remove themselves from your list, which we’ve paraphrased here:
“…an e-mail recipient cannot be required to…take any steps other than sending a reply e-mail message..
This means even more diligence is required when managing replies. You, as the sender, must include a valid reply-to address and read/respond to replies often. Also, avoid reply-to’s such as “donotreply@” or “noreply@”. It is essential to honor unsubscribe requests when subscribers ask to be removed via replying to your email. Additionally, avoid the dreaded “DO NOT REPLY TO THIS EMAIL.” For more details, read the BrontoFire episode, “Don’t Hide That Unsubscribe” (look under the TurboTax section).
“…an e-mail recipient cannot be required to…take any steps other than visiting a single Internet Web page to opt out…”
If you are using Bronto’s unsubscribe and/or manage preferences landing pages, you are in the clear. However, this is a good time to review how you are communicating the unsubscribe option. Ensure that the unsubscribe button/link is clear and easy to find. The harder it is to unsubscribe, the easier it becomes to “mark as spam,” “junk,” and/or issue a more formal complaint. Again, we suggest reviewing the BrontoFire episode.
Aside from unsubscribing, the other big addition was to help identify the legal ’sender’ of a co-marketing message. Co-marketing messages are those in which two or more companies are marketing within the same email. If you are not sending these types of emails, there should be nothing to worry about. This change is helpful because it definitively states that the company identified in the FROM line is the legal sender and must be responsible for honoring unsubscribes and presenting their postal address.
Speaking of postal addresses, including a valid physical postal address in email communications has been a requirement since the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 was first passed. Don’t forget to update your address information in Bronto (Home–>Settings–>Address) to ensure that it’s accurate and up-to-date.
In order to better facilitate the inclusion of an accurate address in all marketing emails, Bronto has made several address tags available for insertion into messages. Please replace your existing address with these tags. You may have noticed a warning pop up in the application during sending. This warning is just a reminder to update your messages to include the address tag. In the future, Bronto will require the address tag in all emails. To learn more about Address Tags, you can click the link included in the warning message or search for ‘address’ within the Help tab.
There has already been much written on the new rules approved by the FTC. Everyone in the email marketing community is in the process of digesting this document. The folks at Marketing Sherpa have a podcast, How New CAN-SPAM Rules Affect Marketers on their site (7:20 minutes long). As you listen to the interview, you’ll notice that many of the rules are still “up for interpretation.” As mentioned above, we encourage you to read through the entire release (109 pages, PDF) for more details. Stay tuned for more information.
Please do not hesitate to contact Bronto if you have further questions.
DJ Waldow
Account Manager at Bronto
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{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
I have been receiving the warning about the physical address.
We include our physical address on our emails, for which we use the same basic template. It seems that you could have a search function that searches for our address, so there is no need to go through the extra formatting of inserting the tags. Personally, if I need to, I should be able to replace our address with the tags, but it seems that it would be more user friendly if you could use either an address tag OR actually have the information in the code, that Bronto would inturn be able to recognize the valid address, since the email, either way (with the tag or with the hard-coded address), would be within the CAN-SPAM Act guidelines.