Compliance and Legal Considerations in Cold Emailing
Email marketing is a great way to connect with your audience and promote your products and services.
It is also among the cheapest ways to reach many people at once, including folks who may not be familiar with your brand.
That’s exactly why leading businesses use cold email outreach to generate leads and engage their audiences.
Cold emailing may help you build buzz around your brand and gain traction for your GTM initiatives.
But it might do more harm than good if you are not careful.
There are several legal factors you must consider when running your cold outreach email campaigns.
Today, I’ll share the legal implications of cold emailing and actionable strategies you can use to make sure your emails are compliant and legally sound.
On that note, let’s start.
What is cold emailing?
Cold emailing is a kind of advertising that brands use to reach their intended audience and share a little about themselves or what they offer through emails.
Businesses use cold email outreach for a variety of other reasons.
However, in my experience, it is mostly used for announcements or to present new solutions.
This strategy makes a lot more sense when you consider that 60% of people would rather brands contact them by email than any other channel.
But it’s worth mentioning that you send a lot of emails in a cold email campaign. The recipients may or may not know your brand.
Thus, you might encounter some issues.
But you can avoid them if you make a few legal considerations before you hit send.
Legal considerations for cold emailing
Believe it or not, 82% of businesses use email automation tools to simplify their email marketing workflows. That’s because these tools let you reach out to the masses without investing a great deal of time and energy.
The problem is that mass automating your email marketing campaigns can introduce some legal issues. If you are careless, you may even harm your brand image and reputation.
Here, the idea is you should always communicate your message ethically to the correct audience and create trust in the process.
With that in mind, these legal considerations may help you create effective email marketing campaigns.
#1 General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) guarantees recipients’ privacy and security. It supports the ethical use of personal data and insists that businesses implement certain security measures to protect customer information.
Avoid sharing or trading private information of current and prospective customers to comply with the GDPR.
You should also store the information carefully to avoid unauthorized access or data leaks.
Alongside a safe data storage, investing in a secure file transfer solution is crucial for maintaining stringent monitoring during file sharing within your team or network.
This approach facilitates early detection and helps prevent potential data security breaches.
Note: SmartReach.io is an GDPR compliant email marketing automation platform.
#2 CAN-SPAM Act
A big mistake that businesses make is going overboard with their messaging to their audience.
They might actually allow it to be unattainable for individuals to unsubscribe from their email list.
Such maneuvers violate CAN-SPAM Act violations and can land you in hot water.
Under the CAN SPAM Act, an email has to specify the sender’s name and mustn’t include any misleading or unclear information.
Additionally, it guarantees that recipients can unsubscribe from a list or refuse to get messages from a certain sender.
The CAN-SPAM Act essentially outlaws deceptive or spammy advertising that brands may employ when cold emailing.
#3 Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL)
Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) was made to ensure best practices in email marketing and to curb spamming.
The legislation protects recipients’ privacy and security, and brands are required to implement effective measures to safeguard sensitive information.
Here, the goal is to prevent cybercrime incidents like identity theft, phishing, and more, which may result in unauthorized information access and data leaks.
#4 California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA)
Businesses collect information about current and potential customers to provide personalized experiences.
Most brands disclose how such information is utilized, while some others keep their audience in the dark.
The California Consumer Privacy Act gives people control over what brands request from them and the ability to deny it.
The law also permits individuals to opt-out or refuse consent to receive messages from brands.
4 Best practices to ensure cold email compliance
The following are some best practices to help you stay compliant and avoid legal issues when doing cold email outreach.
#1 Have a relevant email list
Cold emailing requires an email list of people who will get your message.
You can build an email list that targets the right audience to comply with relevant legislation.
In case your recipients, in fact, wish to hear from you and would like to be kept apprised of your special offers, your chances of them complaining about your messages are low.
A similar benefit of having a relevant email list is that you are now able to market your services or products easily.
Email outreach is meant to raise awareness of your brand name to the right audience. Sending messages to individuals who are not even interested in what you are offering is a poor technique that could place you on an email blacklist and trigger legal issues.
#2 Keep your email list updated
Folks might change their preferences as time passes.
They might like to hear from you whenever they subscribe to your email list.
Their priorities may shift over time.
Therefore, you should clean your email list periodically and keep only relevant subscribers.
You can identify such recipients by tracking their interaction with your emails over time.
Although this is unlikely, people might stop using their emails or switch to new ones for unknown reasons.
You should also remove such emails from your list by monitoring the recipients’ activity.
Not updating your email list can have serious consequences. It can impact your email deliverability and open rate for your campaigns.
Sending emails to invalid email addresses raises the bounce rate, which can affect your email deliverability and reputation as a sender.
Ultimately, this will increase the likelihood that your messages will be caught up by spam filters.
Not reviewing your email list from time to time may also cause you to send out emails to recipients who have opted out, violating the law enacted in that regard.
So, an old email list could also hurt the performance of your email marketing campaign and your compliance with laws and regulations.
#3 Offer Option to Opt-Out
Problems growing an email list often involve people being wary of giving up their personal information to brands. So, seeing an email list shrink might be a tough pill to swallow.
That’s why brands make it too complicated for people to unsubscribe from email lists or never let them opt-out altogether.
Some may continue to email recipients after they opt-out or unsubscribe from the list.
Such tactics can damage your brand’s reputation and negatively impact your compliance status with respect to some regulations.
You may lose respect among your target audience and face serious legal consequences for doing so.
Thus, let your recipients opt-out and send messages to people who would like to hear from you.
#4 Consider email personalization
A common cold emailing mistake brands make is sending generic messages to recipients in their email lists.
Individuals have various preferences and interests. Thus, a single size doesn’t fit all.
You can’t just send plain messages to your recipients and expect a positive response. It simply doesn’t work like that.
You should personalize your emails to succeed with email marketing campaigns.
Even if you personalize the subject lines, you will probably accept a 22% increase in open rate.
The ability to tailor your messages to characteristics representing different audience segments increases engagement and regulatory compliance.
#5 Ensure data security
Data breaches are commonplace these days. If you aren’t careful, cybercriminals can get your business or customer information and use it for themselves.
Such incidents harm your brand image and damage your relationship with your customers.
You could also face serious legal consequences for storing their data – you are responsible for it.
Consequently, we recommend you encrypt your customers’ information.
Consider investing in security measures to prevent data breaches, as this will establish a relationship with your customers and abide by the laws.
#6 Be transparent
When you do cold email outreach, you may want to hide your identity from the recipients.
So, you should be transparent when dispatching the emails. You must identify the company and describe why you are contacting the recipients.
Your emails must include the sender’s name, business name, role at the company, physical address, and contact details.
Adding relevant details to your emails helps ensure regulatory compliance in addition to reducing the risk of your messages ending up in spam filters.
Final thoughts
Legal considerations for planning a cold email outreach and best practices to help you comply with the laws were discussed in this article.
Cold emailing can reach your target audience. However, sending out email messages in bulk poses some legal risks.
The suggestions in this article will help you steer clear of legal problems with cold email outreach and get your message to the right individuals.
For those looking for a compliant and reliable platform for cold emailing, try SmartReach.io.
