Digital and social media channels have opened the Internet to a new class of advertisers. Small businesses can now market themselves on the same platforms as multinationals. This freedom provides new opportunities for doing business online. It also involves increased responsibility. Just because you have access to new consumer bases doesn’t mean you have permission to contact them.

Now and in the past, a common marketing technique has been dropping flyers in mailboxes. There is an obvious digital equivalent for this: direct email marketing. What could be easier, cheaper, and more effective than this? Almost nothing. There is a problem with this approach. If your business has access to email inboxes in your local community, so do spammers and scammers.

Protecting consumers from annoying and dangerous spam falls on government legislation. As a digital marketing agency, we have an expert understanding anti-spam legislation. This is an important part of ensuring that our clients and their customers are protected, and the email campaigns we execute are successful.

What Is Anti-Spam Legislation?

Anti-spam legislation is the set of laws discouraging users from engaging in negative commercial electronic messaging practices. What does this mean? Basically, anti-spam legislation does exactly what its name says. It regulates the messages that businesses and organizations are allowed to send you.

Digital and social media makes our attention and inbox accessible by anyone around the world. Anti-spam legislation acts to protect us from hassle and thieves. It’s the reason that we don’t have to sift through thousands of emails from Nigerian Princes and Russian brides to find a weekly flyer from our favourite store. Both types of message come to you from a commercial source. So what separates legal marketing from spam? The illicit emails likely contain words that will be flagged by a spam filter. These filters learn common scams, and remove these emails from your inbox. How else does anti-spam legislation protect you? Let’s take a look.

How Does Anti-Spam Legislation Work?

The key to anti-spam legislation is consent. This is a necessary barrier for protecting consumers and their inboxes. To ensure that an email marketing campaign isn’t in breach of any laws, two types of consent must be clearly provided to the consumer.

• First, people must allow you to send them marketing materials. This is often just a small check box at the bottom of a form, but it ensures that the only people who receive your marketing emails want them.
• Second, people must always have the option to unsubscribe from your mailing list. This must be included as a link in all marketing emails, so that people can opt out at any point.

Consent is what separates wanted and unwanted commercial communications. You had to sign up for the digital flyer from your favourite store, while the Nigerian prince is contacting you against your will. Additionally, if you decide that you no longer want the digital flyers, you can unsubscribe at any time. The Nigerian prince won’t offer you this ability, because he never asked your permission to begin with.

Consent becomes trickier in some places, because many businesses rely on implied consent, rather than express consent. This means that they are able to contact you without you signing up for a mailing list, because they have acquired your information from another legal source. Navigating implied consent can be tricky, but our expert team will assist you in developing a marketing campaign that complies with anti-spam legislation.

Part of a KIMBO Design comprehensive marketing campaign is to ensure that all communications comply with anti-spam legislation. We want to facilitate successful digital communications, and allow our clients to never worry about being mistaken for a Nigerian prince.