When it comes to email remarketing, one question that I get asked fairly regularly is about what is needed to ensure compliance with CAN-SPAM in the U.S. and the European Privacy Directive in Europe when setting up a remarketing campaign. The situation is really straightforward in the U.S. (it comes down to little more than checking your privacy policy), but it is slightly more complicated in Europe.

As a result, we engaged Ruth Boardman, a partner at Bird and Bird LLP, and one of the world’s leading electronic data privacy experts. Ruth and I co-authored a white paper on email remarketing compliance that covers this subject in more depth, and additionally, we recorded a webcast titled Email Remarketing and Compliance (in the U.S. and European Union).

For this blog, we’ll focus exclusively on the U.S., and I’ll write about compliance in the European Union separately.

CAN-SPAM Compliance Remarketing Checklist

The only thing that you need to do to send remarketing emails in the U.S. and comply with CAN-SPAM is to check your website privacy policy.

Most website privacy policies already contain the required language which covers using the data that has been captured for remarketing. But you should check your privacy policy to ensure that yours does as well.

Typically, privacy policies contain sections on:

• (i)  what information will be collected, and
• (ii) what it will be used for.

You should check each section as follows:

• (i)    What information will be collected
  Check that your privacy policy states that you will collect email addresses. This will look something like this clause:

  What Information Do We Collect?
  When you order from us, we collect your name, billing address, shipping address, email address, phone number(s) and credit card number (with expiration date) or gift card number.

• (ii)    What the collected information will be used for
  Check that you have a clause similar to this:

  How Do We Use Your Information?
  We may use your information in a number of ways, including the following:

  For marketing and promotional purposes. For example, we send out email and direct mail to our online and store customers about products or events that we think may be of interest to them. We also may send you offers for discounts or free services (e.g., free gift wrap or shipping) on our site or in our stores.

  Your marketing and promotional purposes clause may cover remarketing, but it is best practice to add a clause specific to remarketing. You can find an example in the email remarketing compliance white paper here.

That’s it. It’s all that is required to comply with CAN-SPAM. Simple, huh?

Next week, we’ll look at remarketing in the European Union and see how things are different in Europe.

While the federal U.S. CAN-SPAM laws apply across all states in the U.S., in Europe it is more complicated. In the European Union, individual member countries are required to craft their own local country laws based on the Europe-wide legislation. As the different countries implemented their laws, each interpreted the requirements of the European Privacy Directive slightly differently. This makes implementing a pan-European campaign more complicated.

Given this confusing landscape and our mission to simplify remarketing for all, we hired Ruth Boardman of Bird and Bird LLP, one of the world’s top privacy lawyers, to work with us and produce a definitive answer to these questions. Working with her colleagues across the U.S. and Europe, we set out to see whether there is one compliance solution that can be applied to both the U.S. and European markets, or if not, which countries could be grouped together to simplify compliance with both CAN-SPAM and the European Privacy Directive.

Ruth and I collaborated on a joint whitepaper that sets out what you need to do to comply for email remarketing campaigns in the following countries: United States, France, UK, Italy, Germany, Belgium, Spain, Hungary, Sweden, Netherlands, Finland and other European countries.

Ruth has also kindly agreed to present the findings with me on an educational webcast taking place on October 12, 2010, at 11:00 a.m. Eastern time / 4:00 p.m. UK time / 5:00 p.m. Central European time. This will be a one-off opportunity to ask the experts your legal, compliance and remarketing questions in an interactive forum.

The webinar recording for this is now available on demand which you can play back by following this link: Email Remarketing and Compliance Webinar.

The accompanying White Paper can be found here: Email Remarketing and Compliance White Paper.