Wednesday, July 09, 2014

Canada starts to punish spam (seriously)

Bad news for those companies that use online and mobile channels for guerriglia marketing..

In Canada has been approved a law that punish (up to 10M dollars fine) the sending of emails to customers without an opt-in option activated.

The name of this nightmare for email marketer is CASL.

There are few but drastic differences between CASL and US's CAN-SPAM law:
- if companies send emails to someone in Canada who has not agreed to receive them, they're in violation of the law
- CAN-SPAM covers emails only, while CASL encompasses all electronic messages, including social media posts and texts

Canada's companies has already started requiring opt-in options to all their customers.

The big problem is for the international companies; experts identified three main steps to avoid law complications:
- Identify who in your database is Canadian, and don't assume that simply eliminating all the addresses will get it done.
- Look at when customers engaged and how often and identify the valuable customers you need to reconfirm right away.
- Understand what you want to accomplish and put a plan into action. You may want to create a new engagement campaign

Now the big question is: which countries will follow?

More details:
http://www.dmnews.com/canadas-anti-spam-law-takes-effect/article/358687/

1 comment:

Nami Liberboim said...

Interesting blog post this week. Thanks for sharing!

I think Canada is right to take spam seriously and deter companies from sending it; however, in true Canadian fashion, is the government going a bit overboard? $10M? Seems excessive.

Maybe Canada can use the $10M to add to its very robust health care system...