Note: This article is intended to give some general recommendations and is not legal advice.
As a critical part of maintaining trust in the AdRoll Email platform, we take anti-spam requirements seriously. We group anti-spam requirements into two categories: Regulatory and Industry.
Regulatory Requirements
Different anti-spam laws are put in place to prohibit sending fraudulent or deceptive emails. Other laws focus even more strongly on requiring opt-in before sending email marketing. Depending on the region your subscriber resides, a company can receive fines for sending the emails in breach of the applicable anti-spam laws, so work with your legal team to know what laws apply to protect your company’s bottom line.
It’s either required or best practice to do the following:
- Provide details about your organization. It is important that people know who exactly is collecting and using their information. This includes the name of your organization and contact details.
- Be transparent about the purpose of your email messages. This can include letting the people know whether emails are transactional or promotional in nature and avoiding misleading subject lines.
- Use the appropriate opt-in mechanism for your subscribers.
- Especially with CAN-SPAM, provide your physical business mailing address.
AdRoll Email provides tools that you may use to assist you to comply with different regulatory requirements, although since they vary for different regions, work with your legal team to know what rules apply. Here are a few features that may help customers with compliance with anti-spam regulations:
- Email Capture: In our template builder, you have the option to include a checkbox to obtain opt-in consent for sending marketing emails.
- Email templates: Our email templates include unsubscribe links and business address information by default.
Industry Expectations
Legal requirements aside, mailbox providers are able to set their own policies on what sort of email they will accept, often just to keep their mailbox users happy. Large mailbox providers, like Gmail or Outlook, develop sophisticated internal anti-spam systems to measure how happy their users are with receiving emails, using spam complaint metrics and hundreds of others signals, and assign what is generally considered a “Reputation” score for each email sender that attempts to engage their users.
Similar to a credit score, but for email, a Reputation is calculated by mailbox providers primarily using Engagement metrics. A Reputation score can tells mailbox providers, on the spot, what to do with email they just received, such as whether to Inbox, Junk, or Bounce the email. A reputation Constantly adjusted due to current subscriber engagement actions (it can update hourly).
In order to meet mailbox provider expectations, focus on engaging your subscribers with content they value, and remove subscribers when they become clearly disinterested.
AdRoll Email may from time to time, take additional steps to maintain industry trust in our email platform, including (on very rare occasions) pausing email capabilities for accounts that cause such things like blacklisting, or other risky indicators as measured by AdRoll’s support team. AdRoll may also pause email capabilities for accounts based on our content policy. [Prohibited Content and Practices: Illegal Products or Services; Prohibited Content and Practices: Inappropriate Content].