Last updated on March 2nd, 2011 at 05:09 pm

Many small businesses find email marketing to be very useful, after all it’s a way of getting your sales message out to 1000’s if not millions of potential customers.

But, before you hit that “send” button there are one or two things that you need to be aware of here in the UK when it comes to the law relating to emails.

Emails are governed by three main pieces of UK law :-

• Data Protection Act 1998
• Privacy & Electronic Communications Regulations 2003 (this also covers SMS Spam).
• Companies Act 2006

 Under the first two pieces of legislation, consumers must have opted-in to receive emails from you before you are able to send marketing emails to them. If collecting email details on your website you should have a privacy policy that says what you will be doing with the information that you are collecting (an example of such a policy is our one at the bottom of every page on our website [or here if you want to look at it] – feel free to copy and adapt this if you wish, all I ask is an acknowledgement that you have done so).

The main rules are as follows…

• The sender of the email must not hide their identity and must provide a valid address for the opt-out of future emails.
• The sender must not send marketing emails without the recipients prior consent to do so. The consent should be in the form of an opt-in or an extremely explicit opt-out.  This does not mean that if you buy a list of emails that you can assume that the recipient has agreed to you sending them an email – check to see if the seller of the list has something along the lines of “I agree to receiving emails from businesses that you feel may be interesting to me”.
• The law is different when it comes to contact details collected through the course of a sale or in sale negotiations. In these circumstances marketing emails can be sent if the emails relate to similar products or services and when the address was collected the recipient was given the opportunity to opt-out.
• The third piece of legislation mentioned above (the Companies Act) relates to companies (not sole traders) and says that every item of business communication, including emails must have the company’s registered office address, registered number and the place where the company is registered – you should note that the “every item of business communication” includes letterheads, invoices, emails and websites.

Breaking any of these laws is serious and can result in fines of thousands of pounds.

Buying Email Lists

As you may know, there are many providers of email lists where you can select potential customer email addresses to allow you to send marketing information to them.

However, as I have mentioned above it is very important to ensure that the data you purchase has been acquired in accordance with the law and not harvested from websites – for example buried away on the Forest Software website (and hidden in the code) is an email address that is never used elsewhere – our mail servers are set up to automatically blacklist any emails senders that are sent to that address, this means that if you buy a list with that email address on it we will never get a single email from  you.

You should check how the data on the list you are buying was collected and if consent was given by the individual. If not, not only is the law being broken and you are liable for a fine but the list is probably also a waste of money if servers blacklist your emails.

As I said at the start of this article, emails can be a very powerful marketing device if used correctly – and as long as you make sure that you abide by the law here in the UK and target your emails then with luck you should get some good results from your campaign.