In this international world and global economy, chances are someone from outside the U.S. will be on your in-house email list…or even a lot of someones. As the email marketer, the onus is on you to make sure you comply with the email marketing regulations of other countries. I wish we as an email marketing company could tell you that adhering to the compliance regulations of one country would ensure your compliance for all, but we can’t. We can, however, offer some practical advice: Practice common sense compliance.
Unless you have the budget for a team that can ensure compliance in each country represented on your in-house email list, you’ll need to practice common sense instead. ReturnPath recently published a list of nine ways to ensure you’re likely to be email compliant in any country. Note the key word here: likely. But likely to be compliant is much better than not compliant at all!
These tips are practices every email marketer should be adhering to at all times anyway. We’ve shortened and paraphrased the nine tips below, in part to show you just how common sense these are:
1. Use only opted in email addresses.
2. Use accurate subject lines.
3. Offer easy opt out.
4. Prove you use opt-in.
5. Use a real reply-to address…and check it.
6. Have a valid postal address.
7. Double check your unsubscribe option to make sure it’s thorough.
8. Don’t harvest email addresses.
9. Have a published privacy policy.
Like we said, common sense. Any and all of these nine tips should be applied even for compliance within the U.S. because even if they’re not legally required, they will be appreciated by your recipients, which can only help your brand.
See ReturnPath’s original post on the topic of international email compliance.
And if you need help ensuring compliance within your email marketing program, call on email marketing company ClickMail.