Part Show Part Business

On Facebook Craig asked this question:

“Does anyone have extensive knowledge of CASL (Canadian Anti-Spam Law)? I am looking at doing some email marketing, but have this weird aversion to law suits… I’m basically just googling Industry X in Location Y, going through the various websites to gather emails, and blasting from there. It’s not opt-in, but there is a caveat for obviously available addresses. Thoughts? The main reason for this method is that I am trying to reach a new market, and don’t have much of a current ‘in’ with it.”

The CASL is the Canadian Anti-Spam law, which is basically the equivalent of the CAN-SPAM act in America.

Making sure your email isn’t marked as spam can be a tricky problem to solve. The best solution in my opinion is the most obvious but people don’t do it because it requires so much more work.

If you don’t want your email to be interpreted as spam then you’ll need to make sure that it is targeted. That means that you’re sending an email to someone that will find it helpful rather than thinking it’s a shameless sales letter.

You can do that by writing in the name of the person you’re sending it to at the start of the email (ex: Good morning John), the company, and other specific information that makes that particular email unique.

Here’s a little trick I’ve used in the past. Your first email can just be an email asking for information about the correct person to contact. Then once they reply you can send off your more sales information to the right person.

The downside to this technique is that you have to wait for them to reply. But if you write your email correctly and send it to the right person you should get a reply most of the time.

The upside to this technique though is that you know that your information is going to the correct person. Plus you’ll also begin to build a relationship with that person in a much more meaningful way than if you had just directly sent your promotional packet. Building a relationship this way makes it easier for you to contact them in the future with new information because you already have an existing relationship.

Unless you’re doing huge amounts of email you don’t really need to worry about CASL. Instead you’ll want to send small amounts of highly targeted emails. If you need to use some sort of mail-merge or bulk email sender, that should be a red flag that your emails aren’t targeted enough.

Just don’t spam people and you should be fine.