Must-Read Disclaimer
Please be advised that this is no way legal advice. This is simply our interpretation of the new Canadian Anti-Spam Law, and its application for inbound marketing.
This information has been designed to help you understand how CASL will impact your marketing efforts and what you can do to ensure you are in compliance with these new privacy laws.
We are not lawyers and nothing presented here is, or should be construed as, legal advice.
This information was prepared in collaboration with Christene Hirschfeld – Queens Council, Intellectual Privacy Lawyer, BOYNECLARKE. Please contact Christene if you wish to seek legal advice about how CASL will impact your sales and marketing activities.
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NOTE: On May 23, 2017, this post was updated to reflect changes to CASL that come into effect on July 1, 2017
When CASL’s transitional provision for implied consent expires on July 1, 2017, you will no longer be able to rely on previously implied consent to send CEMs. Instead, you will have to formulate a strategy to obtain additional express consent or renew implied consent by completing a transaction with your recipient. The good news is that you still have time to obtain express consent.
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In less than seven days from the publishing of this post, Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) comes into effect.
Have you updated your landings pages, email templates and marketing strategies to comply with this new legislation?
If you haven’t, you may soon be violating Canadian privacy law.
Here is what you need to do in the next few days to comply with CASL.
1. Update landing pages to require explicit consent
CASL has a direct impact on the way inbound marketers can legally collect email addresses. Under this new legislation, every landing page and contact form must include a number of requirements to comply. Fortunately, most of the new requirements can be updated relatively easily by editing your landing page templates and updating your live pages.
The biggest change for inbound marketers is the way contacts must now opt in to receiving your commercial electronic messages. For your landing pages and contact forms to be CASL compliant you now need to include a checkbox (it cannot be pre-check) and clear messaging that states what types of communication contacts are opting into.
“By checking this box, I agree to receive occasional special offers from Kula Partners. I am aware that I can unsubscribe at any time.”
As a marketer you should be thinking about the messaging you will use to encourage page visitors to check the box and grant you their permission to send them commercial electronic messages.
As sales focused inbound marketers, we are taking the approach that all contacts must now check the opt-in box and provide explicit consent to be marketed to. Our opinion is that if a contact is unwilling to check the box and opt-in to our educational marketing emails, it is unlikely that they are a good sales prospect. We don’t want a bunch of tire kickers in our email database.
If you disagree with our approach, you can certainly make your op- in process optional and let people view your context without agreeing to be marketed to, but that seems rather counterintuitive to the goals of inbound marketing.
In the next few days you should be updating all of your landing page templates and contact forms to include:
- The business, organization or person who is requesting consent
- An easy way for contacts to unsubscribe
- A valid mailing address and either a phone number, email address or web address
- Explicit consent check boxes and clear opt-in language
2. Don’t worry about your customers, focus on top of funnel leads
CASL comes into effect in two phases. Fortunately, you still have until July 1, 2017, to gain explicit consent from anyone you have an existing business relationship with, but for all of your other contacts, you’ll need to act quickly.
Given the fact that everyone is sending out last minute email blasts leading up to the July 1, 2014, deadline most Canadian’s email inboxes are being bombarded with CASL compliance requests. You should avoid sending any CASL related email communication to your contacts that are protected by the three-year transition period until the situation settles. Wait to contact your customers at a more opportune time.
Instead of joining in the last minute opt-in rush we suggest that you wait and strategically try to gain your customer’s explicit consent by offering a high-value piece of content sometime before July 1, 2017. Use the three-year transition period to your advantage.
May 23, 2017 UPDATE: You still have time to obtain express consent from your customers, but time is running out. If you haven’t yet, start reaching out now.
3. Send out your best content offer to leads that are about to expire
For any contact that you do not have an existing business relationship with you need to get them to explicitly opt-in to continue receiving your electronic messages before July 1, 2014 – which is less than eight days from the publishing of this post.
Instead of sending a blatant email explaining CASL and asking everyone on your contact lists to opt-in to continue receiving your sales and marketing emails we suggest the following strategy:
Send a short but valuable email that addresses a common pain point members of your email list are likely experiencing. Within the email include just one link pointing to a CASL compliant landing page that offers up your highest performing asset – this could be a whitepaper, a cost calculator, a webinar recording or any piece of content for that matter. Briefly, explain how the content download will help the recipient address their pain point.
On the landing page make the conversion process as simple as possible. Don’t ask for anything other than the contact’s email address and for them to check the explicit opt-in box. The goal is to maximize the conversion rate so you can retain as many of your email contacts as possible.
This email should go out at least 3-4 days before CASL comes into effect.
4. Last resort is sending out an email explicitly asking for consent
After sending out a valuable offer in an email, as described above, you will undoubtedly have a number of contacts that have not opted-in to receive your marketing emails. In a last ditch effort, you can send an email briefly explaining the new CASL legislation and directly asking contacts if they would like to continue to hear from you.
In many ways, these new requirements reflect email marketing best practices that industry thought leaders have advocated for years.
If you are actively engaging in whitehat email marketing, CASL will not have a huge impact on your strategy. For those organizations who are still purchasing email lists and soliciting products/services to contacts that have not opted in your strategy is going to come to an abrupt end on July 1, 2014.
Inbound Marketing in the Post CASL Era
The restrictions outlined in CASL have redefined how marketers can legally generate new business. More so than ever marketers need to find ways to attract website visitors, convert leads and close customers – pull rather than push.
Inbound marketing is now more important than ever. To learn how inbound marketing can be put to work for your organization, download our Executive’s Guide to Inbound Marketing
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What is CASL?
If you do any form of email marketing with businesses located in Canada, or you have people on your mailing list who live in Canada, you are subject to these new laws even if your business is based outside of Canada.
Want to learn more about CASL? In part 1 of this blog post we covered the Plain & Simple Must Know Facts About CASL
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The information presented in this blog post was created in collaboration with Christene Hirschfeld, Queens Council, Intellectual Property Lawyer, BOYNECLARKE. Please contact Christene if you wish to seek legal advice about how CASL will impact your sales and marketing activities.
Christene is a partner at BOYNECLARKE and lives in Queensland, Nova Scotia. Her practice focuses on business and intellectual property law. She is often invited to speak on intellectual property as well as matters relating to business related issues including financing, privacy and other topics.
Christene’s name has been included in the publication The Best Lawyers in Canada since its first edition in 2006 and she has been given Distinguished Attorney Rating from Martindale-Hubbell. In 2013, Christene was named the Best Lawyers’ 2014 Halifax Information Technology Law “Lawyer of the Year” and also was a recipient of a 2013 Lexpert Zenith Award “Celebrating Women Leaders in the Legal Profession”. She is a founding member of Women in Film and Television – Atlantic, a member of the Canadian Intellectual Property Office’s Speakers Bureau, an Associate of the Law & Technology Institute, an Affiliate of the Intellectual Property Institute of Canada, the Past Chair of the Canadian Bar Association’s National Intellectual Property subsection, Past Chair of the Nova Scotia Chapter of Canadian Women in Communication, a past director of the Information Technology Industry Alliance of Nova Scotia and a former lecturer at Dalhousie University Law School. Christene has been recognized by her peers and is regularly included in Best Lawyers in Canada and Canadian Legal Lexpert Directory.
