America: Ready For Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation?
If you think that American businesses should not be concerned about the upcoming Canadian anti-spam legislation, you’d better think again! The new legislation, to be enforced on July 1st, 2014 (Canada Day, eh!), is one of the strictest in the world.
The Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) applies whenever a computer system located in Canada is used to send or access a commercial electronic message. If some of your clients access messages in Canada, you have to comply in order to avoid salty penalties (up to $10 million). Commercial electronic messages (CEM) include not only emails and SMS, but also any social media messaging systems such as Facebook Messenger and LinkedIn InMail.
The law has three main requirements:
- You need to obtain consent to send messages
- You need to provide identification information in your messages
- You need to provide an unsubscribe mechanism
If you’re an Uberflip customer, we’ve got you covered with the new opt-in checkbox on our form CTAs. They will allow you obtain consent from your leads while collecting the usual information. It’s also important to understand that under the new law, you cannot presume consent using a pre-checked box.
There are several actions that can be taken to prepare before July 1st. The infographic below breaks it down into easy 8 steps:
- Internal awareness and education
- Evaluating your workflow
- Segmenting your existing subscribers
- Acquiring explicit consent
- Obtaining double opt-in
- Removing non-CASL-compliant subscribers
- Documenting your efforts
- Staying CASL-compliant
“Everyone in the organization needs to be aware of the basics and importance of CASL” - Tweet it
"Make sure all channels that feed data into your mailing list follow proper procedures" - Tweet it
“Make sure your email marketing team understands that there are new rules to follow” - Tweet it
Infographic courtesy of the Flora Pang Startup Marketing Blog.