When newsletters are Spam

One of the great advantages of selling online is the speed at which you can reach your customers to inform them of new products and offers. Direct e-mailing allows us to put our sales pitch in front of thousands of potential buyers with virtually no perceivable cost of delay.

With e-mail marketing being such an attractive tool, chances are that you are already utilizing it in someway. Have you though stopped to consider whether what you are doing is actually legal?

The Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003

On 11th December 2003, UK law was changed to make certain types of commercial e-mail illegal in an attempt to crack down on the flood of unsolicited junk mail (or Spam) that clogs people’s inboxes every day.

With possible fines of up to £5,000 for getting it wrong, not to mention annoyed customers and bad press, this is a law that everyone involved in online selling needs to be aware of.

Unsolicited commercial mailing is illegal

Put very simply, it is now illegal to send anyone a commercial e-mail unless they are either a previous customer of yours or have expressly asked to be contacted by you.

To be an illegal mailing your message doesn’t have to be hawking grey-market pharmaceuticals or promoting pornography. In fact, the product or service that you are selling has nothing to do whether the mailing itself is legal or not. What counts is whether you have permission from recipient to send commercial mail to them. Just because you don’t think that your message is spam does not mean that it isn’t illegal. Or, as the law puts it:

“Except in the circumstances referred to [below], a person shall neither transmit, nor instigate the transmission of, unsolicited communications for the purposes of direct marketing by means of electronic mail unless the recipient of the electronic mail has previously notified the sender that he consents for the time being to such communications being sent by, or at the instigation of, the sender”

When you can mail

Before you erase your e-mail list and head to the post-office for a few thousand second class stamps, there is some good news. You can still use email to directly market to people who have expressly requested it.

You can also send your email marketing to past customers, as long as the products/services you are promoting are broadly similar to and the customer was given a way of opting out of such communications when they made the sale.

Also, for some reason beyond the understanding of this author, the law only applies to the email addresses of individuals not companies. If you can be sure that the address you are mailing is a work email address then the "opt-in" rules don't apply.

Contents of the mail

The law does also make some additional requirements with regards to the content of your email marketing, although these are quite straight forward.

The first requirement is that, when sending direct marketing by email, you must not try to conceal the identity of the sender. Aimed at the less-savory side of email marketing, this rule is unlikely to affect many legitimate stores interested in building a successful online business.

The law also requires that a valid email address is provided for those who do not want to receive similar material in the future.

A silver lining?

In truth, these changes to the law are not all bad news for store owners. The requirements have been best practice for many email marketers long before they were a legal requirement, and will actually help you to build a more targeted and responsive email list.

As with any discussion of legal matters, this short article is really no more than a summary, but hopefully a helpful one. More detailed information can be found by following the links below:

- 09th September 2004

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