Why Email Suppression List Management Matters

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As of 2019, email marketing has officially entered middle age. Like a lot of 40+ year olds, email marketing can look back at a long history of success and, by committing to a set of best practices going forward, shows no sign of slowing down anytime soon. One of the foundations of the continued ‘good health’ of the industry, is a focus on best practices in email compliance.

What is Email Compliance?

In the early days of email marketing, there were few laws or official regulations that set standards for the industry to follow. As the adoption of email grew and the marketing channel expanded, as well, it became clear that guidelines were needed to both protect consumers and provide a rulebook for marketers to follow in their email programs. While there Belgium Email List are various laws governing email marketing around the globe, in the United States, the most relevant law is the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. CAN-SPAM provided a clear set of rules under which email marketers could lawfully send marketing messages via email to a list of recipients.



CAN-SPAM includes a number of requirements for marketers to follow when sending ‘commercial’ email messages. Some of the key aspects (but not all) of the CAN-SPAM Act include:

Don’t use false or misleading header information (From, To, and other routing info)
Identify the message as an advertisement
Don’t use a “deceptive” subject line
Provide a mechanism for recipients to opt-out of future mailings
The law also defines penalties for companies that are found to be non-compliant with their email programs. Currently, the FTC can impose a fine of up to $41,484 for each separate email sent in violation of the law.

One aspect of CAN-SPAM that can be challenging for marketers is a requirement that if an advertiser engages with a third-party company to handle their email marketing program or to market on their behalf, both the advertiser and the third-party company can be subject to fines for non-compliance. So, any company that hires an email marketing agency or leverages affiliate marketers must monitor those third-parties to ensure compliance.