Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to reach your customers. Offering a healthy return on investment (around $36 for every $1 spent the last time we checked), it is quick, efficient and inexpensive.
If you’re involved in email marketing, or just thinking about dipping your toe in the email marketing waters, you need to be familiar with ‘spam’ legislation.
Whether it’s artificial meat in a can or junk mail, no-one likes spam. While the former is still readily available on supermarket shelves, the Australian government has legislated against the latter with the Spam Act 2003.
Minimising spam complaints
People typically report an email as spam by clicking the “this is spam” or “report spam” link in their inbox, or using the email’s unsubscribe link and marking the reason for unsubscribing as “spam”.
According to industry experts, an acceptable spam complaint rate is anything less than 0.1%, or 1 complaint for every 1,000 sent messages.
Content Empire’s Cathy Wever explains that aside from the potential financial penalties of breaching spam laws, having emails reported as spam can hurt deliverability rates, damage reputation, or even get you blocked by internet service providers.
“Protecting our clients’ brand and reputation is paramount. The last thing we want is for our marketing emails to be reported as spam,” she says.
To keep your in-house legal team happy and avoid sending spam, follow these 5 key steps:
1. Ensure you have consent
Before sending marketing emails, you must ensure that you have consent from everyone who will receive your emails.
People can consent:
- Verbally, either over the phone or face to face
- By ticking a box or filling in a form on a website
- By filling in a paper form
Cathy explains that there are instances where, even if a person has not explicitly given consent, it is acceptable to ‘infer’ that you have their consent.
“For example, if a person has a provable, ongoing relationship with your business, and your emails are related to that relationship, then it would be generally accepted that your emails are not spam,” Cathy explains.
Inferred consent is a grey area, so we recommend, if in doubt, seek the advice of the experts at the Australian Communications and Media Authority.
It’s important to note that under the Spam Act, it is up to you to prove that you have a person’s consent, so it’s advisable to keep a record.
2. Clearly identify yourself as the sender
To comply with spam laws, your message must clearly and accurately identify the person or business sending the message.
“Even if a third party sends emails on your behalf – whether that’s an individual or an agency partner – the emails must still identify you as the business that authorised the message,” Cathy explains.
3. Provide contact details
In addition to clearly identifying the person or business who has authorised the email, the message must also include the correct contact details for that person or business.
“If you’re sending a legitimate marketing email, then it’s unlikely that you’ll send it out without clear branding and contact details, but it’s worth noting that the information must remain correct for at least 30 days after you send the message,” Cathy says.
4. Make it easy to unsubscribe
When setting up your email marketing, you need to ensure that people can easily ‘unsubscribe’.
The unsubscribe request must:
- Be actioned within 5 working days
- Not require payment of a fee (beyond carrier fees for the unsubscribe request)
5. Do not use address-harvesting software
Address-harvesting software trawls internet pages collecting email addresses from public data.
Under the Spam Act, you cannot:
- use or supply a distribution list that has been created with address-harvesting software
- use or supply address-harvesting software.
Penalties for non-compliance
There are very real (and costly) penalties for breaching spam laws. In 2023 the following companies paid penalties for spam breaches:
- DoorDash paid $2 million
- Uber paid $412,500
- Kmart paid $1.3 million
- mycar Tyre and auto paid $1 million
- Commonwealth Bank of Australia paid $3.33 million
- BetDeluxe paid $50,000
- Ticketek paid $500,000
Cracking down on spam
In addition to government legislation, email platforms themselves are cracking down on spam.
From February 2024, Gmail and Yahoo require anyone sending to a Gmail or Yahoo account to adhere to stricter authentication, unsubscribe and anti-spam standards.
“For email marketers in the B2B space, sending to Gmail and Yahoo addresses is not such a problem, but for those in customer facing businesses, they will need to ensure they’re on top of these requirements,” Cathy says.
Read more about Gmail’s email sender guidelines on their website.
At Content Empire we are proud to support clients with high impact email marketing strategy and execution. For professional advice and guidance on your email marketing, contact us today.