SPAM Regulations and Permission Based Emailing

Before you embark on email marketing it is vital that your protect yourself by reading, understanding and implementing the Australian Government's legislated requirements. Put simply: they are the law - compliance is not optional!

For an easy to understand guide click here.

The information below is provided as a further aid to your understanding of what The Online Shop Designer (TOSD) considers to be valid permission based emails.

In signing up for The Online Shop Designer(TOSD) email services you will be asked to agree to both the Australian Government's legislated requirement and the guidelines below.

Its all about permission

Spam is any email you send to someone who hasn’t given you their direct permission to contact them on the topic of the email.

To send email to anyone using e-glue, you must have clearly obtained their permission. This could be done through:

• An email newsletter subscribe form on your web site.
• An opt-in checkbox on a form. This checkbox must not be checked by default, the person completing the form must willingly select the checkbox to indicate they want to hear from you.
• If someone completes an offline form like a survey or enters a competition, you can only contact them if it was explained to them that they would be contacted by email AND they ticked a box indicating they would like to be contacted.
• Customers who have purchased from you within the last 2 years.
•  If someone gives you their business card and you have explicitly asked for permission to add them to your list, you can contact them. If they dropped their business card in a fishbowl at a trade show, there must be a sign indicating they will be contacted by email about that specific topic.

Basically, you can only ever email anyone who has clearly given you permission to email them on the particular subject you’re contacting them about.

What kind of email address ARE NOT OK to send to with e-glue?

Essentially, anything not covered by the guidelines above does not constitute permission, but to further illustrate the point here are some examples that do not comply.

By using e-glue, you agree not to import or send to any email address that:

• You do not have explicit, provable permission to contact in relation to the topic of the email you’re sending.
• You bought, loaned, rented or in any way acquired from a third party, no matter what they claim about quality or permission. You need to obtain permission yourself.
• You haven’t contacted via email in the last 2 years. Permission doesn’t age well and these people have either changed email address or won’t remember giving their permission in the first place.
•  You scraped or copy and pasted from the web. Just because people publish their email address doesn’t mean they want to hear from you.

What content MUST I include in my email?

Every email you send using e-glue must include the following:

•  A single-click unsubscribe link that instantly removes the subscriber from your list. Once they unsubscribe, you can never email them again.
•  The name and physical address of the sender. If you’re sending an email for your client, you’ll need to include your client’s details instead.