Marketing Studies

On July 1st two new U.S. state e-mail laws, which impact all e-mail marketers, came into effect.

As usual, MarketingSherpa was quick to follow-up with interpretation and has a great how-to article on the topic (open-access until July 10th).

To summarize:

a] Both lists set up Do Not Contact lists where children e-mail addresses or e-mail addresses that can be accessed by children can be registered.

b] The law prohibits you from sending any content or links to content that children can't legally see or respond to. Period. Existing business relationships and opt-in lists have no bearing on the matter.

c] Penalties can even include jail time.

d] Unappropriate content might even include information of financial services, such as credit card offers. And yes, this also includes content on the sites you're linking to in your e-mail communications.

e] The only way to be completely safe is to run your lists through the purge lists, which will be made available soon.

The text of both laws is available here.

E-mail marketing just got much harder ... again.