Email marketing

Email marketing can be a powerful, low-cost tool to connect with new customers and keep in touch with existing ones. But you’ll need to check that you’re complying with specific regulations to make sure you don’t upset or alienate recipients of your emails or be the subject of a complaint to regulators or prosecution. There are two key legal areas you need to consider – anti-spam regulations and data protection laws.

Spam and unsolicited marketing

Email marketing is regulated by the E-Commerce Regulations. These laws ban the sending of unsolicited marketing emails (also known as ‘junk’ email or 'spam') to individuals (including other businesses who are sole traders and individual partners in a partnership) unless they have agreed that you can, known as ‘opting in’.

If your email marketing campaign is directly relevant to people’s work, you can still send unsolicited marketing emails to people at limited companies or limited liability partnerships. For example, if you’re selling print services you can email the people responsible for stationery buying or marketing and promotion - even if you haven’t got an existing relationship with them.

In any event, you must always provide a clear and easy ‘opt-out’ mechanism in all marketing emails you send so that recipients can easily remove themselves from your list and stop receiving marketing emails from you. These rules apply even if you buy in an email list from a list broker.

Data protection rules

As you’ll be handling people’s personal details when you’re sending them e-newsletters or e-bulletins, you’ll need to be sure you’re complying with data protection legislation.  As it’s likely that you’ll hold the recipients’ details (at the very least their name and email address) in a database, you need to make sure it’s properly maintained and secured. You may also need to register with the Information Commissioner.