Computer mouse over a spam inbox with 372 emails

Email is still one of the most powerful marketing tools and platforms for communicating with your audience and customers. With over 4 billion users, most people prefer to receive brand communications via email. However, your email marketing and communications can only work well if your email retains a healthy reputation and avoids spam complaints. Otherwise, you’ll impair your ability to communicate with your customers, market effectively, and could even suffer fines. This can all be a little complex, so to help you understand all this, we’ve created a comprehensive guide to email reputation and spam complaints.

What is Email or Sender Reputation?

Email is extremely easy to send and automate. As a result, it’s also easy for someone to send countless unsolicited emails. If there were no filtering and monitoring systems, everyone’s inbox would quickly become inundated, at least more than they already are, with emails. As a result, internet service providers (ISPs) and email service providers (ESPs), like Gmail, use reputation systems to separate legitimate emails from fake or malicious ones. They track the his reputation by the number of emails sent in a certain time, their open rates, the engagement levels, and parsing the email text for malicious or deceitful content. If too many are sent, unopened, or users report your emails as spam, your email domain’s reputation reduces. If it drops too low, your emails become undeliverable. Conversely, if emails are opened and clicked, the reputation increases and emails will reach their targeted inboxes.

Why is a Low Sender Reputation Bad?

If an email domain has a bad reputation, their emails will be filtered to the junk/spam folder or worse, never reach a mailbox. In either case, your email marketing and communications won’t reach the recipients’ main inboxes and will remain unopened. Developing a bad email reputation becomes a circular problem. As less emails reach recipients’ inboxes and reroute to spam folders, your audience opens and enages with less emails. If low enough, further negatively impacts your reputation. A bad reputation won’t affect just newsletters or other broad communications. With a low enough reputation, even purchase or order updates won’t be delivered. That’s why maintaining a healthy email reputation is vital to your business’ online operation as well as its marketing. 

Developing a Healthy Email Reputation

When you start sending email communications, your email will have little to no reputation, good or bad. As a result, you will need to slowly build up and strengthen it. To do this you will need to start sending emails that are opened and clicked. Shipping and purchase confirmations will help with this. If you are sending communications to a set of subscribers, like a newsletter, you will start sending in smaller batches to avoid looking like an automated spammer. Most email services, like Klaviyo, provide this as a warming up process. You will also need to repeat the same warming process should you change your ESP.

Some other strategies to increase sender reputation are to only include links to reputable websites. Personalizing emails will increase your open rate, indirectly improving your reputation. You will also want to avoid any spam complaints, so be sure to send emails to recipients who have consented and are expecting to receive emails from your business. 

Avoiding Spam Complaints

One of the main things that can harm your email sender reputation out of your direct control are spam complaints. Most ESPs allow for users to identify and report an email they’ve received as spam. When they do this, the complaint is registered to the ESP, and ISPs track this event. As a result, your reputation will quickly reduce as multiple users report your emails as spam. To avoid those, you will want to send emails that are expected and wanted by your audience. It’s also good to avoid spammy phrases, like “free”, “bargain”, “cash”, or all capitals. Users are more likely to immediately report these emails as spam, and ESPs can automatically filter these phrases to spam. 

Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation

Avoiding spam complaints isn’t just a matter of interest and email efficacy. It’s also the law in Canada since 2014. Canada has anti-spam legislation (CASL) which makes it illegal to send unsolicited emails or messages to those who haven’t provided their consent. Lack of consent is a primary issue and is the cause of over half (68%) of reports made to CASL. Consent is either explicit (someone has agreed verbally or in writing to receive emails) or implicit (a previous interaction with your business allows you to send pertinent emails for a limited time.

To send newsletters or other broad marketing communications under CASL, you need explicit or implicit consent. However, implicit consent is time-limited at a maximum of 24 months, still requires thorough records proving it, and most third-party platforms have more strict terms of service that will require explicit consent regardless. That’s why it’s best practice to and we recommend you obtain explicit consent. Plus, consent must be easily revokable at any time through an unsubscribe link at the bottom of your email. Many email marketing platforms such as Klaviyo and Mailchimp will require you to have one in your email before it can be sent and will include one for you.

If you lack that consent and send emails, your business is in breach of CASL and recipients can report you to the government. Nearly 6800 reports are submitted weekly. Enough reports can lead to an investigation and possible fines. Fines begin at a few thousand dollars, but an individual can be charged per violation up to a maximum of $1 million, while a business can be required to pay up to $10 million for spamming recipients. Along with the fines, your business’ violations and penalties will be recorded on the government of Canada’s website. That will harm more than just your email’s reputation. Plus, ISPs and ESPs monitor these lists, and your business will be recorded, requiring you to rebuild your sender reputation.

The Responsibility of Email

Email is a powerful marketing and communication tool but needs to be used responsibly to maintain a healthy sender reputation. If you fail to respect spam legislation and proper communication standards, your sender reputation will drop, directly impairing your business’ ability to communicate with its customers and audience. If you want to learn more about build a healthy email reputation, have interest in the exact requirements of CASL, or want to learn how to obtain explicit consent, contact Rosewood’s marketing team who are experts on all things email.

Paige working at a laptop, curating to build the best email audiences for our clients

Email is still one of the best ways to communicate with and market to your audience. It remains an essential communication tool used by the majority of the population and is how most customers prefer to receive communications from brands. However, email’s strength as a marketing tool depends on the quality of your audience list. An engaged audience is interested in your newsletters, with a substantial portion opening, reading, and clicking them. The key is building that perfect subscriber list. We’ll explain the proven strategies for building your best email audience list in this blog.

A Visible and Present Email Signup

You might only just be starting your email newsletter and need to build your subscriber list or you’re looking to grow it to a more substantial following. To get more users, you will need them to voluntarily sign up and explicitly consent to receiving your emails. Provide an email signup that is always accessible to users. The standard place to put an email signup is in your website’s footer. This will provide a visible but unobtrusive signup form on every page of your site. No matter what page a user visits, they can see the option to sign up. Another option is at your point of sale (POS) online and in-person. Your online checkout can include a simple checkbox where users can provide their consent to receive email signups. As customers check out in your brick-and-mortar store, you can similarly provide an opportunity for them to sign up by offering digital receipts.

A Website Popup

Another standard method for collecting emails is a website prompt that offers users an email signup form. This ensures every visitor learns about your email list in case they do not see the form in your website’s footer. Be sure to delay this popup to at least 30 seconds or one minute after someone has been browsing your website. Also, the popup should be easily closed and not obscure the entire webpage. If a popup is too immediate and obtrusive, it will only annoy new visitors to your website. Imagine someone asking you to buy a car before getting a test drive or even seeing the interior. Give users a moment to recognize your business’ value proposition so their interest is piqued. They will then be more likely to want to sign up for your newsletter when prompted.

Enticing Sign Ups

It can help to incentivize users and customers to sign up to your email newsletter. A prevalent but effective strategy is to provide a one-time discount to those who subscribe to your newsletter for the first time. This is great for those already browsing and/or shopping on your site, where the footer and popup can notify them of this discount. To attract other users, we recommend hosting a giveaway or contest where signing up to your newsletter is a requirement for entry. With an enticing prize, users will happily agree to provide their email. Note if you are a service-based business providing a discount will also work, or alternatively, you could provide a sampling of what you provide, such as a free template or one module of a course you provide.

Collect Pertinent Information for Your List

You want to make your signup process simple and fast, otherwise users may abandon it and never join your list. However, there is some essential information you want to collect. Besides the necessary email and explicit consent, you will also want to collect their first and last name. This will help specify the customer in your email system, and you will be able to automatically send emails personalized to their first name in the body text and subject line of future emails. Such personalization gets their attention and can increase open rates by up to 50%

Further Personalization for the Best Email Audience

More information about your email subscribers will allow you to craft even more personalized emails. This can include automated communications, such as product recommendations. You don’t and can’t collect that data from the start. Instead, that is information you can gather based on their purchases or browsing behaviour on your website. Email platforms can connect to your ecommerce to unify this information. Another method for obtaining some more of this information is to provide voluntary surveys that help you collect valuable information. 

The Best Email Audience is a Clean Email Audience

A lot of this has focused on growing and expanding the information in your email list. However, a bigger email list is not always better. Be sure to regularly clean out your email audience of any disengaged members. Subscribers who don’t open or click your emails will negatively impact these rates, but more importantly, won’t give you a proper sense of what email content is resonating. Set up automations that both sunset and try to win back these subscribers. In either case, you will have a reengaged subscriber or cleaned your list to be more effective.

Constant Maintenance

All these strategies are essential to building your best email audience. Just like the perfect garden, the truly best email list needs to be constantly maintained with sowing, fertilizing, pruning, and weeding. If you’re wanting to start email newsletters, expand your audience, or set up crucial automations, contact us about our expert email services.

Dasha working on a website at her laptop with a coffee.

Privacy protection is a growing issue for legislators in many countries, and Canada is no exception. With digital platforms and tools able to collect more information than ever before, countries need to be sure that users’ data is being collected and used in an ethical and safe way. Currently, Canada is drafting a series of acts for protecting personal information and data, including the Consumer Privacy Protection Act (CPPA) to replace the PIPEDA. While it is still only in its second reading, it will likely be enacted this year with minor changes. User information and data are vital tools for marketers, so they need to understand this new privacy landscape. We explain how privacy regulation is becoming more prominent and what marketers need to know and consider.

A Surge in Data and Privacy Regulation

In recent years, there has been a wave of new digital privacy regulations with a slew of acronyms. One of the first major acts was the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in 2018. Since then, many members of the EU also revised or are drafting their own privacy acts. Outside of Europe, Canada is just one of the many nations revising and updating their own digital privacy legislation. Australia is also drafting its own, while India is currently voting on the Digital Personal Data Protection Bill (PDPB). Brazil passed its own Brazilian Data Protection Law (LGPD) in 2019. In the U.S., numerous states have enacted and are currently drafting their own legislation.

Privacy Legislation in Other Provinces, States, and Countries

All those different acts are important for marketers and businesses. If operating and potentially collecting data from users internationally, they need to be sure they are following that nation’s privacy laws. That’s still something to consider even when working within Canada. Most places in Canada are subject to both federal and provincial law. While the federal government is still currently working its way through the legislative process for the Digital Charter Implementation Act, 2022, individual provinces like BC and Quebec have already passed and updated their own provincial legislation in anticipation. This is a similar situation for the EU, where each member can have its own privacy legislation in addition to the GDPR, e.g. Germany. It’s slightly different in the U.S., which has no overarching data protection and security law. Instead, individual states, such as CaliforniaVirginia, and Colorado have enacted their own privacy laws. 

Most of these data protection laws are being drafted with similar considerations for individual privacy. However, different countries and regions may have important differences or restrictions/allowances for certain industries. If a marketer is ever working with user information from these areas, it is best that they familiarize themselves with any specific requirements. 

Platform Regulations and Policy

These national, provincial, or stated requirements exist alongside any additional privacy policies set by other companies, such as Apple. Many of the platforms used for marketing, such as MetaGoogle, or Klaviyo also have their own policies about how data is collected and used. In turn, those platforms must also follow legislation, or else face serious fines. While breaches in these policies might not result in legal action for a business, they can result in their suspension or removal from the service. That can severely impact a company’s marketing opportunities as well as their and a marketer’s reputation.

What Does This New Privacy Landscape Mean for Marketing?

The CPPA is meant to protect users and ensure their right to control their information. If marketers are already treating user data with the care it deserves, then they will see little changes to their current strategies. However, there are some specifics of Canada’s new CPPA that marketers should remember:

  • Valid Consent: A primary concern of the CPPA is that users must provide valid consent for their information to be collected and used. This still includes the idea of “implied consent”, but only in instances where the information is necessary.
  • Plain language: One of the biggest facets of the CPPA is clear communication. Whenever requesting consent, a business will need to include a full explanation in “plain language” that details what, how, and why information is being collected, stored, and used. Thankfully, communication and writing in plain and clear language is a standard marketing expertise.
  • Revoking Consent: The CPPA will require that users can easily revoke their consent at any time and have their data disposed. Whether that information was collected via a website, through email, or on social media, marketers and data managers must be prepared to remove that information.
  • Explaining the Algorithms and AI: Since artificial intelligence and algorithms are becoming more advanced, the new CPPA will require organizations to be transparent about how user information is being used with algorithms and more complex learning models to generate content such as personalized messaging.

How the New Legislation Helps Marketers

Those new requirements might make data collection more difficult and affect your metrics. However, it will also help marketers navigate this new privacy landscape. Once legislation passes, the Privacy Commissioner of Canada will create a new accessible list of best practices. This already exists for previous acts, such as the Digital Privacy Act. These parse through the legislation to provide guidelines in clear and directed language for how marketers and organizations should follow the new legislation. This is valuable for marketers since it is a comprehensive list for their own reference. These best practices are also great support documentation to show clients what the requirements are and why.

The Changing Landscape of Privacy

This new legislation in Canada and other nations are creating a new privacy landscape. However, most of it will be familiar territory to marketers already following these best practices and collecting and using data information honestly and ethically. When the CPPA finalizes later this year, we will have a full sense of its requirements and specifications. For now, if you want to ensure your marketing and data collection is prepared for these oncoming requirements, contact our marketing team.