CAN-SPAM Compliance:What Is CAN-SPAM & Why Does It Matter?

CAN-SPAM Compliance
What is CAN-SPAM and why does it matter?

In This Article…

If you’re starting an email campaign or if you’ve been email marketing already but aren’t sure if your marketing emails are CAN-SPAM compliant, this article explains what CAN-SPAM laws are and how to make sure that your email program is complaint with them.

What is CAN-SPAM and Why is It Important?

It’s possible that you don’t even know what CAN-SPAM is. Maybe you think that it involves a popular processed meat product. However, if you’re going to send email to your customers, CAN-SPAM is a very important law that you need to know about. It governs whether the email you send is considered a legal communication or an illegal piece of unsolicited spam. If you don’t abide by it, you’re subject to fines and penalties from the U.S. federal government.

In this article, Comm100 will give you the history of what CAN-SPAM is. Then Comm100 will tell you what you need to do in order to be compliant.

A Touch of History: The Passing of the CAN-SPAM Law

In 2003, as inboxes were being flooded with unwanted email spam, the United States federal government took action with the passing of the CAN-SPAM law. CAN-SPAM stands for Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing Act of 2003. Essentially, the law set forth a number of requirements that need to be met in order to send commercial email to customers.

It’s important to note that the law makes a difference between a commercial email and transactional email. If you’re responding to a customer service inquiry or sending an automated email receipt of purchase, you don’t need to worry about CAN-SPAM. However, any email that contains marketing information or a customer solicitation must comply with the requirements of the law (and that includes promoting links to content on advertising-driven websites). Each individual violation of a rule in the CAN-SPAM requirements can leave you open to a fine of up to $16,000, so following the rules is important! Fortunately, there’s an easy checklist for you to follow.

CAN-SPAM Compliance Checklist

Once you get past all the government language, CAN-SPAM isn’t that complicated. If you just follow seven simple steps, you’ll be completely safe.

Step One: Be Who You Say You Are!

You can’t pretend to be another website or company just to get a user to open an email (or to get into the inbox). This is a popular trick offshore spammers use to get through spam filters, but it’s illegal. The email address that you send from (the “from” address and the reply-to address) must be your own. The domain that you promote in the email must either be your own or be one that you are authorized to promote, and it MUST be the domain that you say it is (i.e.: you can’t tell people that they are going to a site that sells coffee and then send them to an adult entertainment site). Basically, the information that a customer sees in the email has to actually be you or your business.

Step Two: Don’t Lie in the Subject Line

This one is easy. If your subject line says that opening the email will give the user a daily quote of the day, then that’s what needs to be in the email. You can’t use a subject line that promises a discount on groceries and then present an email that promotes anything other than a discount on groceries. In short, your subject line has to be truthful. The terminology of the law is that your subject line can’t be “misleading”.

Step Three: Tell Them That You’re an Advertisement

You can do this many ways, including small print at the bottom of the email. However, somewhere in your email, you need to make it clear that the email is an advertisement. It may seem obvious to you, but the law says that you need to make it explicit at least once in the email.

Step Four: You Need to Have an Actual Physical Location

This one is also simple. Somewhere in your email you must provide a physical postal address (street or postal box) where you can receive communications via mail. This ensures that you are not a scammer and also allows customers a way of sending a verified communication to you to remove themselves from your mailing list.

Step Five: You Have to Let People Know How to Opt-Out

You cannot (and should not) send a marketing email without letting users know how to stop you from sending future emails to them. This is called allowing users to Opt-Out of your email list. This is typically done at the bottom of the email. The only actual CAN-SPAM requirement is that it be easy for an ordinary person to recognize and read this information. Also important is the “universal unsub rule”. If you have multiple newsletters or email lists, you may allow a person to unsub from only one list. However, you MUST provide the option of unsubscribing from ALL future marketing email of any kind. Unsubscribing from all future marketing email is called a “universal unsub”.

Step Six: When People Want Off Your Email List, Take Them Off.

When somebody requests an opt-out or unsub from your email list or lists, you have up to 10 business days to remove them. When you send an email, the information or link to unsubscribe from that email must be valid for 30 days. You’re not allowed to charge a fee for removal from the list or require any information other than the user’s email address. Most importantly, the user can’t be required to do anything other than send you a reply email or visit a SINGLE webpage to unsubscribe. Finally, once a user has unsubscribed, you may not under any circumstance sell or rent that person’s email to anybody else. This is the most complicated part of the law, but it’s also the most important. And, if you don’t honor it, it’s the easiest to get in trouble for because people will get upset if they continue to receive unwanted email from you.

Step Seven: Make Sure You Know What Your Marketing Agency is Doing!

Also make sure that you know what your affiliates are doing! Make sure that you know what anybody who sends email on your behalf is doing! You are legally responsible for the actions of anybody you hire or authorize to send marketing email on your behalf.

There you go. Follow these simple seven steps, and you will be CAN-SPAM compliant. Most third-party email platform providers will actually make sure that any of these criteria that can be automated (such as physical address, unsub links and removing unsubscribed members) are automated. However, it’s in your best interest to always review your marketing emails before they go out to make sure that they meet every criterion on the checklist!

This CAN-SPAM compliance list was provided to you by Comm100. If you’re considering starting to email market or expanding your existing email marketing, Comm100 offers a completely free, hosted email marketing and newsletter solution. It’s both a great long-term and short-term solution to getting your
email marketing off of the ground and supports all of your CAN-SPAM compliance needs as well! Check it out at: http://www.comm100.com/emailmarketingnewsletter/.
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Email Marketing 101: 10 Terms & Concepts You Need to Know

Email Marketing 101:
10 Terms and Concepts You Need to Know

In This Article…

If you’ve decided to implement an email marketing program or are ready to talk to your marketing team or a consultant about email marketing, this article will introduce you to the important terminology, concepts and metrics that you’ll need to understand. Once you have a basic grip on those concepts, you’ll be able to properly evaluate the success of an email campaign or the knowledge of any consultants you may be interviewing.

Learning the Lingo of Email Marketing
The first step to creating a successful plan of action is to understand the key elements of email marketing so that you can speak the language! Comm100 has boiled it down to a top ten, though reading all of the resources in this section of the website can give you a much greater jump start.

1. Open Rate

Open rate means, quite simply, how many people (in percentage form) opened the email that you sent. This metric, however, is becoming less important in anything other than a relative way. Email open rates are tracked using a small graphic in the email. Many email providers block graphics. Because of this graphic blocking, a client may open an email and have it not register as being opened unless the client actively turns on graphics. Some reports suggest that standard open rate reporting can be off by as much as 35%, depending on your email list.

What you should remember is that open rates should be highest when emailing your existing customers and lowest with cold leads. Comparing open rates across various sends is useful, too. It’s not a 100% accurate number, however.

2. Click-Through Rate

Click-through rate is the number of clicks (in percentage format) compared to the number of opened emails (NOT to the entire send). Different companies measure this in different ways. Unfortunately, there isn’t a standard answer for the question: “Is it all clicks or does only one click count per open?” This measurement is important because the entire purpose of your email is to drive traffic to your landing page or website.

3. Deliverability

Deliverability means the number of emails from your send that actually made it to the inbox (as opposed to the junk folder or the black hole of “unknown address”). Getting your email into the inbox can be a complicated process, and Comm100 has gone into detail in a full article in this section.

4. Personalization

Personalization is when you use a client’s user name, first name or other unique information in the email that you send. To do this, your database needs to capture that information, and your email service provider needs to accept and include data fields that match. Be careful using personalization. It’s not appropriate for every industry. However, in the right context, it can improve email conversions dramatically.

5. List Cleaning/List Scrubbing/List Pruning

Keeping your email list “clean” is important. The more bad email addresses (typos, defunct accounts, etc.) that you have on a list, the more likely you are to get flagged as potential spam. Also, your reporting metrics won’t reflect your email’s true performance. Many email providers automatically prune lists of bad names as you go along. Explore your options with your email provider.

6. CAN-SPAM

CAN-SPAM is a piece of U.S. federal legislation that was passed in 2003. It’s a set of rules that you MUST follow when sending email if you want to not be classified as spam and potentially face federal fines and penalties. Comm100 has included an article in this section that details the rules. Make sure you know them!

7. Opt-In/Double Opt-In

There are three kinds of email lists. “Opt-In” means that your users have “opted into” your email list and given you permission to email them. “Double Opt-In” means that users have given you permission twice (usually via a confirmation link in an email). All other lists are considered cold lists or prospect lists (usually bought or rented). There are different benefits to each kind of list. See our full article to figure out which is best for you!

8. Unsubscribe/Opt-Out

Quite simply, this is the ability of users to unsubscribe from your email list. There are two types: Universal Unsubs and List Specific Unsubs. Universal Unsubs are users who unsubscribe from all future emails of any kind from you. List Specific Unsubs will unsubscribe from just a portion of your list. For example, they don’t want special offers but do want weekly newsletters.

9. HTML Email/Plain Text Email

These are the two types of email that you can send. An html email includes colors, tables and graphics. A plain text email includes only text. In truth, you should send both formats because not all email clients (and particularly some phones) accept html email. However, figuring out what balance works for you may be trial and error.

10. Bounce Back

Bounce back is the number of names on a list that get returned to you as “undeliverable”. This could be because the email address was mis-typed, the email address doesn’t exist any more, the email address has a full inbox, or any other number of reasons. This metric is most important when you’re using a bought or rented list because it shows you how many bad email addresses you purchased.

Email marketing is obviously more complicated than just ten concepts! But this will get you started. There are lots of great articles within this section to increase your knowledge. By reading this collection of articles, brought you by Comm100, you can easily come up to speed on how to run a successful email campaign. Don’t forget that Comm100 offers a completely free, hosted email and newsletter solution. It’s both a great long-term and short-term solution to getting your email marketing off the ground and working on mastering the email marketing concepts from this article!

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Why Send Email?

Why Send Email?
How email and newsletter follow up increases customer lifespan.

In This Article…

If you’re considering implementing an email marketing program but aren’t sure if it’s really worth the time or effort, this article explains how email marketing can turn your customers into more loyal customers who, in turn, are more profitable customers. In this article, Comm100
explains the customer lifecycle and what type of email to send at each point to get the most out of your customers and your email marketing program.

The Customer Lifecycle and Email

All customers have a lifecycle with your company or brand. They start when they become a customer, are active as they make a certain number of purchases or site visits, and then lapse or exit your brand. Email is a reliable, robust and cost effective way to both acquire new customers and also to make your existing customers repeat, loyal customers.

Because even bulk email is easy to personalize, you can create messages that speak to customers’ exact needs at any point in the customer lifecycle. You can affordably contact and recruit new customers, and you can also continue to promote your company to customers after their initial purchase. Sending existing customers email reminders, special offers or even just information newsletters gives those customers a reason to return to your company or website and, ultimately, makes them more valuable to you.

Sending the right email at the right point in a customer’s lifecycle is the key to activating, retaining and even winning back customers. Here’s what to send, and when!

New Customers Leads: Big Offers, Big Brand Talk

If you’re using an email list to contact prospective customers, you need to remember that you are dealing with people who may not know your brand or your product. Cold leads are not inclined to purchase naturally, so you need to put a big offer in front of them! Emphasize your value proposition, but the nature of these emails needs to be a hard sell.

Also remember that you may expect a small return from these emails. That means that it is equally important that even if the email doesn’t spur an immediate action, it establishes your brand in the user’s mind. Make the email content engaging and promote your brand visually and within the text. Then, the next time the user thinks of a product related to you, they will remember your email solicit.

New Customers: Make Them Feel a Part of Something!

You’ve got a customer! What’s the best way to make sure that customer keeps coming back? Make them feel like they’re special and part of a conversation with your company instead of just a nameless face in your customer database.

Adding an automated email (with personalization if your database captures it) that generates after an initial sign-up or purchase is a great retention tool. The email should come from a key figure in your company (CEO, President, Founder) or a personalized customer service agent. The email should not only thank the customer for the purchase but also ask them for feedback, educate them about your company and give them clear directions on how to contact customer service for any of their needs.

Active Customers: Newsletters and Weekly Specials Keep Them Paying Attention

We all know that very few active customers will stay active customers forever. However, one way to extend the length of time during which they will stay active is to use email to give them both relevant information and incentives to continue purchasing.

A simple weekly email that includes a quote of the week or fun fact and that week’s special goes miles to keeping customers engaged. The one thing Comm100 wouldn’t recommend is using your weekly email only to promote specials. Content such as articles and factoids will drive opens and readership even when a customer isn’t in a purchasing cycle and therefore increases customers’ engagement time with your brand.

Short Term Lapsed Customers: A Little Push!

Most places define “short term lapsed” customers as customers who haven’t taken an action in the last thirty days. This may vary for your product and purchasing cycle. The most important email that you can send is to identify these “just lapsed” customers and send them an offer right as they are hitting the short term lapsed threshold.

At that point in their customer life cycle, customers will still have brand awareness and loyalty. It may take just a small offer from you to get them back into the purchasing cycle. Sending them an offer to respond to before they become further distanced from your company or brand will have the greatest impact on lengthening customer lifespan.

Long Term Lapsed Customers: New Customer Leads All Over Again

Don’t let that database of inactive customers go to waste! Many of those clients will have brand loyalty and existing reasons to return to purchasing from you.


Comm100 suggests emailing your long term lapsed list once a quarter. Unfortunately, you’ll need to pull out the big offers again. These are customers who, for whatever reason, went away. You’re trying to convince them to come back. What’s the benefit? They’ll likely be less resistant than completely cold leads.

Seasonal Customers: Remind Them That You Exist!

If you market a seasonal product, you should send a cycle of emails to your lapsed clients leading up to their seasonal purchases. They’ll certainly be getting exposed to marketing messages from your competitors and may just need a friendly reminder from you that you’ve successfully met their seasonal needs before. Identifying these users in your database and communicating with them at the right time brings them back, and extends their value to you.


Email marketing can be as simple as sending a weekly newsletter that summarizes what happened with your company that week, but it also has potential beyond that. Taking the time to identify customer patterns in your database and sending those customers the right message at the right time can increase your customers’ engagement and activity with you … and that will increase their revenue value!

No matter where you are in identifying the points of your customers’ life cycles, the first key to successfully emailing to them is to choose an email sending partner that meets your needs. Comm100
, who provided this complimentary tutorial on when and where to use email marketing, offers a completely free, hosted email and newsletter solution. It’s both a great long-term and short-term solution to getting your email marketing off the ground whether you’re just sending to your active buyers or going deeper into your customer database!
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Comm100 Live Chat Has Passed the Microsoft “Designed for Windows Mobile” Logo Test

Comm100 Live Chat for Windows Mobile has been tested by VeriTest and meets the criteria for the Microsoft "Designed for Windows Mobile" program: Designed for Windows Mobile 5.0 Pocket PC Logo Test. We are now eligible to use the "Designed for Windows Mobile" Logo on our business materials about Comm100 Live Chat.

By enabling businesses to take chat requests while on the go, Comm100 Live Chat for Windows Mobile can help businesses significantly improve workforce productivity and responsiveness, increase sales, reduce cost, and improve customer satisfaction as well.

Thanks.

“123456”

An interesting news was reported last week. According to the foreign media reports, Israeli security company Imperva worked out a result showed that"123456" is the most frequent password people use,the second and the third passwords are "12345" and "123456789". Imperva analyzed the 32 million passwords which was stolen by hackers last month, the results of is that “123456” is the most frequent password,it is at the proportion of 1%,then followed by "12345" and "123456789."

Let’s Pray for Love silently

True love is a tree in a forest,although only one,it can provide us with shelter in the rain;True love is a drop of water in the sea,although only one,it can swash the spindrifts of life;True love is a star in the vast universe,although only one,it can reflect the bright sunshine.

In the novel King Lear,the auther described that the king in ancient Britain was old and weak.He decided to divide his possession into three parts and to give them to his three daughters.The eldest and second deceived their father by pretty words,and therefore,each of them got one third of the possession.But then, they maltreated King Lear to crazy,and drove him away.The little daughter couldn"t flatter her father"s misery,she at once sent soldiers to rescue him.Finally,King Lear died of craziness.After reading King Lear,I cried for the human relations that was broken by the British capitalistic society.Feulanthropy formed the boundary among sympathy,philanthropy and reality.When people were so poor that they had only money and profit left,they simply regarded friends as strangers, regarded parents as strangers.Usury became the bridge for people to communicate.In a world that money led,more and more political tragedies were put on.I fell in deep thought,if there were no profit,history would be changed.Sometimes,we need to repay peace to soul,and baptism to spirit.

The respect for parents,love between couples,followship among friends,care for children,piety for teachers......all have melted in language.We need to understand it by heart.LiMi proved his respect for grandma by taking actions,and wrote down the moving article Memorial on earnest plea,and won approval by peoplpe all around the world.Zhugeliang showed his worry about his motherland,and left a good name for a hundrad generations by Memorial on Dispatching the Army.However,an ordinary person couldn"t have such a strong will.But to sow the seeds of love is within our ability.Who can bear the scene that a begger kneeling on the ground and drinking rain water?But to my disappointed,I only saw the sympathetic looks and sad expressions.Out of the crowd,the rushing passers by appeared and disappeared like lightning.Perhaps at that moment,what the begger badly needed wasn"t money,but greetings,encouragement,or just faith.Love is so,it"s with us all the time,but someone will never find it in his lifetime.

Love is a strange thing,it needs to be given,to be created.In fact,love has already permeated into every field.Teachers sow the seeds of love;doctors light up the fire of life by love;painters decorate the world with love.Love is permanent,love is the biggest possession in one"s life time.After reading King Lear,I couldn"t forget the little daughter"s philanthropy.Yesterday"s misery has gradually passed away.Our body has got warmth because of love chain.Our soul won"t be lonely any longer.Love chain leads us to the paradise of love,and gives us the warm sunshine.Let"s light up the fire of love by heart,may every pearl in love chain would be bright.I wiped the dirt on the book softly,and reviewed Shakespear"s monumental work King Lear,then came out the call for love from the bottom of my heart.Therefore,I wrote down the words that have hidden in my heart for a long time.

The Difficult Situation in Haiti

Although the materials of every country had arrived in Haiti, but the supplies haven’t been reached in the victims, mainly because the infrastructure was almost completely paralyzed, the transportation was hindered. Currently, the airport of the Haitian capital hosted by the United States, U.S. officials said the influx of national goods were absorbed in the Haitian capital Airport, the airport has saturated and could not unload supplies, the British rescue team circled over half an hour because there was no place to land,had to fly away at last. According to another report, the Chinese rescue team planed carrying 20 tons of relief supplies, but it took six hours to unload all the goods.

Humanitarian Disaster

Four days after the earthquake, international aid and food began to slowly arriving at Haiti, but because of traffic congestion, tens of thousands of homeless and injured people were lack of drinking water and food, the capita was filled with desperate breath.A number of international organizations, warned that if relief supplies can not reach the victims as soon as possible, it may lead to unrest and trigger a second wave of disease and death, even the outbreak of a wider humanitarian disaster. UN spokeswoman Elizabeth Bair said that the earthquake in Haiti is the worst disasters ever in the world. Earthquake razed to the ruins of the capital,tens of thousands of people were at the situation without adequate food or clean drinking water, with untreated injuries living in the street.

Why America has the enthusiasm?

After the Haiti occurred an earthquake, the United States showed an unprecedented positive in the rescue process: 2 hours after the earthquake, the first batch of relief troops had sent out; to next Monday, the United States sent more than 1 thousand soldiers to Haiti -- part of this that should be sent to Iraq or Afghanistan; the United States sent the most advanced military equipment, such as maritime mobile hospitals and so on;two former presidents- Democrats Bill Clinton and Republican George W. Bush-set up jointly the Foundation for assistance to Haiti ; Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the United States Agency for International Development with the Director of the United States to inspect relief work in Haiti; earthquakes in the United States before the citizens of Haiti, if the visa expired, allowed to continue to legally stay in the United States.

The Hardness

At the afternoon,I arrived at the office of my father.I did not realize his hardness until I saw the working condition.I really feel sorry for my father.He is always happy and never says tired.I have found a lot of write hair on his head.Suddenly I feel that he is much older than before.The pressure of life has made him have more wrinkled.However,he does not lose the confidence of the life.I want to work as soon as possible.So I can make money to lose the burden of my father.