Is Your Law Firm Email Strategy Compliant? (Checklist Included!)

Did you know that there are email rules and regulations all businesses need to follow? 

• Email marketing revenue is expected to increase to $17.9 billion by 2027, so knowing the rules can keep businesses from making costly mistakes. 
• All companies in the US leveraging an email marketing strategy must adhere to the CAN-SPAM act. 
• Businesses that are non-compliant with the act are subject to fines up to $46,517!

With the rapid rise of social media, you may be thinking email marketing is dead, but that’s far from the truth! According to Statista, there are already 4 billion daily email users, and by 2025 the number is expected to increase to 4.6 billion.  

Email marketing is a powerful business tool and one of the best ways to reach clients directly. Like social media, a significant benefit of email is that firms can easily track the ROI through metrics like open and click-through rates. 

Another big plus of using email is that once your firm begins to collect a list of prospects and clients, you can quickly start dividing them into different segments. For example, you could have a list of active users, inactive users, referrals, active cases, invoices, etc. This helps firms throughout the acquisition and retention process. 

However, as great as this sounds, we all know how it feels to get unwanted emails. Studies show that most of our inboxes are full of promotional emails: 

For this reason, the CAN-SPAM Act protects users like you and me against spam and unwanted emails. 

 

Firms leveraging or looking to leverage an email marketing strategy need to know about this regulation because those that don’t comply are subject to steep fines of up to $46,517! Yes, $46,517.

 

You can avoid that by staying informed.

The CAN-SPAM Act

The Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act, CAN-SPAM act, was signed into law by President George W. Bush on December 16, 2003, and it established the first ground rules for all commercial emails in the US.

• Similarly, Europe has the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), and Canada has the CASL (Canada Anti-Spam Law). 

Here are the 7 rules all your commercial emails need to follow:

1. 1. Don’t use false or misleading header information. Your “From,” “To,” “Reply-To,” and routing information must be accurate. The user must be able to identify the business that initiated the message. 
   2. Don’t use deceptive subject lines. The subject line must accurately reflect your message.
   3. Identify the message as an ad. Businesses must disclose if a message is an advertisement.
   4. Tell recipients where you’re located. Your message needs to include a valid postal address – this could be your current street address or private mailbox registered with a commercial mail receiving agency.
   5. Tell recipients how to opt-out of receiving future emails from you. This is very important. Your message must include clear explanations of how the recipient can opt-out of receiving your emails in the future.  
   6. Honor opt-out requests promptly. If you receive any opt-out requests, you must be able to process them for at least 30 days after the message was sent out and honor the opt-out request within 10 business days. 
      • Once a user has told you they don’t want to receive any more messages from you, you cannot sell or transfer the email address. The only legal way to transfer these addresses is if you hire a company, e.g., a legal marketing agency, to take care of your email addresses.
   7. Monitor what others are doing on your behalf. Remember, if you hire another company to handle your email marketing, you are still legally responsible for complying with the law. Both the third party and your law firm are lawfully accountable.

Protect Your Firm From Fines  

Whether your firm or a third party is handling your email strategy, it’s critical to know how to navigate the regulations that protect all users. We’ve compiled a FREE easy-to-follow email anatomy pager to help you implement some email best practices.

Download Your NEW Email Anatomy Strategy.

As digital continues to grow daily, new rules and regulations will likely be enacted to protect all users. If you have questions about email compliance or, better yet, want to put your emails in the hands of experts – we’ve got you covered.

 

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