As email marketing becomes a more popular tool for targeting consumers, marketers should take care not to get caught violating myriad state and federal regulations concerning the practice.
According to Stephen Durchslag, a leading promotion industry attorney with the Chicago law firm of Winston & Strawn, here are the key state guidelines marketers should be sure to follow. Durchslag discussed these and other legal issues at a series of breakfast roundtable seminars conducted this morning at PROMO Expo:
1. Transmission or other routing information should not be forged, falsified, or omitted, and no third party Internet domain or email addresses should be used without the permission of the third party.
2. The subject line of the message should begin with “ADV:” to designate the message as a commercial advertisement and should not contain any false or misleading info.
3. The first line of message text in the body of the email should notify the recipient of a toll-free number or return email address to contact to decline further unsolicited ads. The text should include the name, street address, and email address of the sender and notify the recipient of the date and time the message went out.
4. No unsolicited email should be sent in violation of the policies of Internet Service Providers regarding the transmission of unsolicited commercial email after having received notice from the ISP.
5. In Delaware, the message must be send from person to person (“between human beings”) – no random name generators or other programs should be used to automatically send the message to a list of recipients.
6. The text of the message should not be false, deceptive or misleading in any manner and should comply with all advertising laws which are applicable to real space advertising.
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