Canada’s anti-spam legislation (CASL) went into effect July 1st, and I’m curious to see how it’s affected email marketing in Canada.
Although we’re only a month in, we’ve already emailed our list 4 times and I bet many of you have as well.
We’d like to know — how’s it going? You can help us out by taking this five-minute survey (Survey is now closed) on your email marketing efforts. We’ll close the survey down in a month and then compile the results on our blog shortly after that. We’ll also make sure that the raw data (anonymized, of course) is available for download.
Note: The survey is now closed. We’ll publish the results the week of September 15th!
The majority of my contacts are media people to whom I send media releases and public service announcements. Normally when I send out a PSA, I would be thrilled with getting a 25% response rate. Now, when I need 100% response I am not quite so pleased. Very few have asked to be refused from my list, they just haven’t responded at all. Unfortunately, this is exactly what I expected. Most people don’t have the time to respond to all of these requests. The true test will be when I send out my next PSA, which will likely be within the next 24 hours. Hopefully I can do it without getting fined.
Thanks for the comment, Brian! Let us know how your next PSA goes.
This CASL thing was an unneeded panic attack for business owners. Getting their permission to continue sending them emails is a joke, in my opinion. If you had set up your newsletters correctly from the start (having a clearly labeled unsubscribe button) there was no need to contact your list for continued permission. They can opt out at anytime. This CASL created extra work for business owners, I think we should all send an invoice to the Gov’t for the time we wasted on this stupid legislation. They should have given clearer instructions.
The flip side of this whole thing, I received a TON of spam emails from companies, I’ve never subscribed to, asking me for permission to continue spamming me! It was like they saw a brilliant opportunity to do one last spam push before the law kicked in. Genius!
So really was this whole hoopla worth the time and anxiety? I say No. Us honest business owners should have ignored this thing from the beginning.
Definitely good effort on part of the government for putting together CASL. As Dennis mentioned it was great to see everyone come out of the woodwork and give us the opportunity to unsubscribe from subscriptions we may have been unaware of, it was pretty convenient.
However while the legislation will make the rules stricter for legitimate operations, it makes me think about how realistic and expensive it will be to pursue the serious offenders who will not comply and who were at the root of most of the problems in the first place.
A clear interpretation of the law can be found on Mail Chimps site: http://kb.mailchimp.com/article/about-the-canada-anti-spam-law-casl/