How to navigate CAN-SPAM for transactional emails

Make sure you comply with CAN-SPAM

As with all marketing channels, an email campaign's success or failure will depend on a range of factors. Email marketers tend to focus on performance metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates to evaluate a campaign's effectiveness. There is also another integral factor that is crucial to delivering long-term success to any email campaign: compliance.

In recent years, there has been significant regulation introduced, as well as best practice identified, with respect to data, privacy and permissions. The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, for example, is designed to protect consumers from unwanted emails. Additionally, the GDPR has changed the way businesses may communicate with their customers in the EU. When a contact unsubscribes from your emails, Autopilot will update their email permissions to reflect this, to prevent them from being sent any further emails.

When sending different types of emails, particularly to customers, you’ll want to give them the option to opt out of certain email types. While the best practice method for this is to use specific list unsubscribes, in some circumstances, you’ll need to get an important transactional email such as account updates or invoices to a customer who has unsubscribed from all comms.

Use this power wisely

In this Success with Autopilot journey, we enable you to temporarily update a contact's email permission to send a transactional email, before closing off email permissions again. To ensure that you comply with GDPR and CAN-SPAM, this journey must only be used for truly transactional emails that relate to a contact's account details, such as confirmations or system messages.