Email Marketing: What Even The Best Do Wrong

Learn what some of the best marketers are doing wrong when trying to comply with CAN-SPAM email guidelines.

If some of the country's leading and most respected marketers are failing to comply with the Can-Spam Law, are you?

One-third of commercial e-mail is breaching the new anti-spam legislation, says a report by Jupiter Media. When it tracked e-mail by 55 leading marketers across a range of industries, it found even "notable" companies — no names were given — were making mistakes that made them vulnerable to prosecution.

Here's what Jupiter found and how to prevent your company from making the same mistakes:

• Are you including your physical street address in each e-mail? Only 64% of the electronic e-mail messages tracked provided the physical postal address of the sender, which is required by the law. The law doesn't specifically say it needs to be a street address but Jupiter says a postal box isn't enough.
  
• Is your opt-out process timely? About 25% of marketers continued to send e-mails more than 10 business days after someone had opted out, breaking the law requiring opt-outs to be processed within 10 days.

Another tip: Check the language in our opt-out messages. Some companies are unwittingly publicizing their inability to comply with the law by saying things like, "Please allow us up to four weeks to remove your e-mail."

• Is the opt-out process easy and intuitive?

You may want to check how easy it is to opt out. Many companies make it unnecessarily difficult for people to opt out, for example, by making them go to preference pages that need passwords and user names.