Guidance on Canada’s anti-spam rules for commercial electronic messages (CEMs).
Canada’s new anti-spam legislation requires all Canadian and International businesses sending CEMs (commercial electronic messages) in Canada (including emails, text messages, instant messages, social media messages, automated phone messages…) to:
Attention US/International Marketers: If you were under the impression this legislation only applies to Canadian companies you are mistaken. All businesses sending CEM’s to individuals in Canada are subject to the new rules.
Take a look at your current and past marketing campaigns and how you interact and sell to incoming, currently active and past leads. For each marketing activity, make careful note of how you capture/captured the data and what you communicate/communicated.
Essentially anything that creates a marketable list
Express consent requires that a recipient must proactively OPT-IN to receive future CEMs. Once you obtain express consent you can continue to send CEMs to these contacts indefinitely until they specifically indicate they wish to unsubscribe.
It is no longer acceptable to include pre-checked boxes on forms or automatically combine consent with another offer. Including pre-checked boxes on landing pages/forms was common marketing practice for many businesses. It is important that you review all forms and identify contacts that previously submitted forms with pre-checked boxes – these contacts do NOT qualify as having provided express consent.
You will need to track and record when a new contact is added to your database, what landing page they saw, what forms they submitted and whether or not they opted-in to receive future CEMs from your organization. As you collect the consent you will have to ensure you create clear and auditable records.
Implied consent applies to contacts that have an existing business relationship with a company. This falls into two groups:
Group A: Current customers, previous customers, industry associations with members, partnerships, other types of business agreements or prospects who downloaded content in exchange for an email address.
Group B: Prospects who asked for quotes/information via an online form, phone inquiries, provided you with a business card or interacted with you at a tradeshow.
The Good News! Effective July 1, 2014, for all new contacts acquired in Group A you have 2 years and 6 months for contacts in Group B to secure express consent. You can continue to send CEMs during these timeframes.
Even Better News! All the contacts you obtained before June 30, 2014 with Implied Consent (both Group A and Group B) are subject to an extended 3-year transition period. This means you have until July 1st, 2017 to secure express consent and you can continue to send CEMs to them until that date.
As of July 1, 2014, you can no longer send any CEM’s to contacts that were obtained from unknown or other sources where there is no record of any type of consent or pre-existing business relationship. All these contacts should be archived or purged from your list.
Keeping your data well organized is the key to success. Separate your existing contact base into manageable groups.
TIP: It is important you retain the exact date the consent was provided for all contacts and a sample of the form/template they completed. In the event of an audit or a complaint, the onus is on the business to prove they obtained express consent.
TIP: If you are using a marketing automation solution such as Hubspot, Marketo or Eloqua, you can easily use a series of lists to track CASL Compliance.