As of July 1, Canada’s Anti Spam Legislation (or CASL) comes into effect. Basically, if you are running some kind of email list through MailChimp, Constant Contact or iContact, you need express permission from the people who are on that list in order to continue to send them emails.
Here’s an article I wrote about this a while back: New Email Spam Regulations: What You Need to Know.
Constant Contact has an excellent CASL checklist that you can download and go through to make sure your list is compliant.
What many people are doing are sending an email out to their lists asking them to confirm they want to be on the list. If you do not confirm, you’ll be deleted from the list.
If you want to follow suit, here are a couple of excellent examples, that explain the situation and then create a really clear call to action:
One question I’ve been getting a lot is, “if I have an email subscription option for my blog, do I need to send these out?” As far as I can tell, from the research I’ve done, and conversations I’ve had online with people in the know, the answer is no. As long as you have express consent from people to be on your list (they have to give you their email address and give consent when they subscribe to your blog’s RSS), and they are able to unsubscribe at any time, you should be fine.
Additional resources:
Feedblitz is a great resource, including: CASL: The New Canadian Anti-Spam Regulation
The rules for NFPs or Charities are slightly different. Read: 9 Things NonProfits Need to Know about CASL
Rebecca, Great check list for bloggers and small businesses to use.
One other thing to note is that you have 10 days to remove someone from your subscription list once they have unsubscribed. So check that you have a good business process to immediately update your database when someone unsubscribes.
And all the experts I have heard/spoken with clearly reinforce your comment about not having to get express consent again. But if you added people to your subscription list because you did business with them over 2 years ago or met them at a conference, you will want to get their express consent.
Thanks for that, Tracey! I think people are just trying to be thorough when it comes to asking for consent (again), and I appreciate that, but if you’ve done the double opt-in, you should indeed be fine. If you’re using an e-newsletter service, it will automatically unsubscribe people when they request. Part of the reason I like ’em so much!