Email Compliance for Small Businesses: A Beginner’s Guide

Email remains one of the most popular forms of communication for businesses and organizations. In fact, over 63 percent of professionals prefer to use email for marketing automation compared to content or social media. However, it’s essential to handle email data ethically.

Email compliance ensures that your organization’s email activities conform to federal rules and regulations. This way, you can make sure your emails align with legal requirements, respect user preferences, and protect customer data.

In this post, we’ll take a closer look at what email compliance entails, and why your business needs it. Then, we’ll discuss six key compliance regulations, and show you how to achieve total email security. Let’s get started!

What Is Email Compliance (And Why Is It Important)?

A business is considered to be email-compliant if it adheres to strict laws and regulations that ensure the safety, security, and privacy of email data. For example, there are specific requirements like data protection laws and anti-spam standards that your business must meet.

While email is a popular and convenient method of communication, theoretically, anyone can read messages (not just the intended recipient). That’s why companies are required to demonstrate compliance via protections like email encryption, access controls, and more.

Additionally, email compliance is the responsibility of every member of your organization. Naturally, it’s the job of those in charge to make sure that email security is managed and maintained. However, IT teams, legal teams, and your employees are also accountable.

For example, it’s the responsibility of the IT team to manage email servers and implement email security software. Meanwhile, legal teams are tasked with making sure emails comply with internal and external regional laws.

As such, email compliance is essential for any reputable business, and failure to meet these requirements can result in heavy fines. However, violations also have the power to ruin your business reputation and cause long-lasting damage to customer relationships.

6 Key Compliance Regulations

Now that you know why it’s important to comply with email compliance standards, here are six key regulations that your business needs to know.

1. General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

The GDPR came into effect in the European Union in 2018 and pertains to all organizations that handle the personal data of EU citizens. It doesn’t matter if your business isn’t based in the EU – you still need to comply with the GDPR if you have customers who live in the EU.

This data protection law grants EU residents sole ownership of their data (so it doesn’t belong to the companies that hold their data). This means that businesses must obtain explicit consent before processing an individual’s data.

Plus, individuals need to be told how their data will be used. They also have the right to access, change, or erase their data at any point.

Therefore, your business needs to maintain a high level of IT security and confidentiality safeguards. Failure to comply with the GDPR can result in financial penalties that consider factors like the category of personal data affected and the intentional or negligent character of the violation.

However, the worst violations can incur fees of 20,000,000 EUR (or 4 percent of your annual turnover).

2. The CAN-SPAM Act

The Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing (CAN-SPAM) Act defines rules that govern the email marketing activities of an organization. This U.S. legislation was introduced in 2003 and provides email recipients with the right to opt out of emails.

However, unlike the GDPR, businesses don’t need to obtain explicit consent before sending commercial electronic messages. Still, every email should enable individuals to opt out of future messages. When they receive an opt-out request, businesses have ten days to cease email communications.

Additionally, the CAN-SPAM Act ensures that businesses communicate with complete transparency. For example, some of the guidelines prohibit companies from using deceptive subject lines and false or misleading information.

Each violation of the CAN-SPAM Act is subject to fines of up to $51,744.

3. Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL)

Canada’s Anti Spam Legislation (CASL) was enacted in 2014 with the purpose of combatting spam and related issues. Similar to the GDPR and CAN-SPAM, this legislation regulates the abuse of spam, but it involves much more stringent requirements for marketing emails.

Unlike the CAN-SPAM Act, CASL ensures that businesses obtain consent before sending emails and texts. Additionally, every message from your email domain must identify the sender and contain a mechanism that enables recipients to unsubscribe from future communications.

An unsubscribe request must be honored within ten days to maintain compliance.

If your business violates CASL, you can face fines of up to $10 million. Even individuals can be subject to fines of $1 million for non-compliance.

4. Data Security Regulations

Certain industries that handle personally identifiable information (PII) or personal health information (PHI) are obliged to protect private data and maintain confidentiality.

Here are some of the main regulatory bodies used to maintain email privacy laws:

• The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). This standard ensures that all businesses accept, process, and store credit card information in a secure environment.
• The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). This federal law protects sensitive health information from being disclosed without the patient’s consent or knowledge.
• Service Organization Control Type 2 (SOC 2). This is a cybersecurity compliance standard that ensures that third parties manage customer data in a secure manner.
• The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP). This is a U.S. government-wide compliance program that provides a standardized approach to security assessment, authorization, and monitoring.

Again, most of these compliance laws offer heavy fines for non-compliance. For example, the non-compliance fee for PCI DSS ranges from $500 to $100,000 per month. Meanwhile, criminal penalties can also be imposed for intentional HIPAA violations.

5. General Consent Rules

If you send newsletters, promotions, or updates via email, it’s important to obtain clear consent from recipients. For example, you should state why you’re collecting personal data (and how you intend to use it).

Some email compliance regulations involve a double opt-in process. This way, even if a user provides their email address (usually through a signup form), you can send an opt-in email to confirm the action. Plus, it’s best to get explicit consent for one specific thing at a time.

For instance, the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR) outlaws unsolicited marketing emails in the UK. Like the GDPR, it doesn’t matter if your business isn’t located in the UK, but if you sell goods or advertise to UK citizens, you must be PECR-compliant.

Failure to comply can result in criminal prosecution and fines of up to £500,000.

6. Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 is a civil rights law. It was enacted to protect people with disabilities from discrimination. Therefore, it’s important to make sure your emails comply with these accessibility standards.

The easiest way to do this is to utilize the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). For example, your emails should include a text alternative for non-text content, captions for audio content, and sufficient contrasts between text and backgrounds.

Consequences of non-compliance may result in hefty fines and/or lawsuits.

How to Achieve Email Compliance with SirsteveHQ

An effective way to ensure email compliance is to choose a secure email hosting provider. At SirsteveHQ, all plans come with a custom email domain that matches your website.

In addition, the email hosting service provides advanced email protection from spam, ransomware attacks, and phishing attempts.

Better yet, SirsteveHQ offers full email backups, which enables you to keep copies of your email data and history on SirsteveHQ’s secure cloud servers. Plus, every package comes with at least one dedicated IP address to stop your emails from landing in spam folders.

Not only is SirsteveHQ great for email compliance and security, but it also encourages productivity. For example, you can set up multiple email accounts with just one purchase, access an integrated calendar, and access your inbox from all devices.

Conclusion

Email compliance ensures that your business follows specific protocols in data privacy and other standards. These rules and regulations may be mandated by the government, your state, or your industry, and failure to comply with these laws may result in financial and legal penalties.

To recap, here are six key email compliance regulations for your small business:

1. GDPR
2. The CAN-SPAM act
3. Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation
4. Data security regulations like PCI DSS
5. General consent rules like the PECR
6. The Americans with Disabilities Act

At SirsteveHQ, you can set up complete email security for your business inbox. You’ll get access to all the latest threat protection to prevent spam, malware, and other malicious attacks. Plus, you’ll get a custom domain, and your own dedicated IP address. Get started now!