Email Marketing and the Long Arm of the Law!
July 20, 2010
Do you use email marketing as part of your marketing communications? So many companies are now using it to communicate with existing customers and prospects. There are so many benefits to email marketing, the main ones being:.
- Super low cost
- Super fast
- Super flexible
- Super instant reporting and analysis
So email marketing really is super. But do you know what isn’t so super? Being given a £1000 fine for not complying with the Companies Act 1985. Now I bet you’re thinking “1985?! Email wasn’t even around in 1985, how can there be legislation made up about something that didn’t even (commercially) exist!?”. Well the Companies Act 1985 has been updated on a regular basis I’m afraid, and was last updated in June 2010.
Companies Act 1985 and Email Marketing:
If your business is a private or public limited company or a Limited Liability Partnership, the Companies Act 1985 requires all of your business emails to include the following details in legible characters:
- Your company’s registered name (e.g. XYZ Ltd)
- Your company registration number;
- Your place of registration (e.g. Scotland or England & Wales); and
- Your registered office address
This information should also appear on letterheads, forms and your website.
It is not enough to just have this as a link in your email, pointing to the relevant page on your website. You must include something like:
Super Organisation Ltd is a company registered in England and Wales. Registered number: 1234567. Registered office: Super House, 21 Super Street, London, SE1 1AA.
The fine is enforced by Trading Standards and can also come with a £300 a day fine for each day you do not rectify the situation.
If you aren’t email marketing at the moment, but want to find out more about it, get in touch with us – call 023 8083 7271 or email info@SMEketing.com. We have a fully comprehensive email marketing tool – read this blog post for more details, or visit our Email Marketing services page.
Filed under: Email Marketing
4 Comments Leave a Comment
1.
Sarah Howard | July 25, 2010 at 11:19 am
Crikey! I didn’t realise this was actually something you had to add to emails and websites. I’ll get this added to my email footer asap!
Thanks for the advice.
2.
Ed Roach | September 3, 2010 at 1:52 am
I find it odd that your 4 main reasons for using email marketing show no benefits. Your criteria should be the ability to put your message directly under the nose of a prospect and also the fact that it works to bring you leads should be your utmost concern.
The four you mention have absolutely no value if it didn’t work. The motivation is misdirected. The four are actually bonuses BECAUSE IT WORKS when done consistently.
I don’t care how cheap, fast, flexible or analytical it is if it doesn’t communicate to my target audience.
3.
SMEketing | September 9, 2010 at 11:32 am
Hi Ed,
Thanks for your comment. I have to disagree when you say that the four reasons we mentioned for using email marketing included no benefits. Compared to something like direct mail, the speed, measurability and low cost of email marketing are huge benefits.
The majority of marketing activities have the goal of putting “your message directly under the nose of a prospect” – so I don’t feel you can say that this is a key benefit of email marketing. Getting the job done (of sending out your message) isn’t a benefit – it’s a goal. And with email marketing that’s not always a goal that is achieved. Deliverability rates of emails can be very low if the sender makes errors in the creation of the email (such as creating spammy content, sending to a non opt-in list, send via a poor ISP, creating an email that is purely based on images etc).
I feel this might be a good topic for a future blog post – how to ensure deliverability of your emails, as this is a key part of email marketing. If you can achieve a high deliverability (and renderability rate) with your email marketing, the benefits of low cost, speed and flexibility will soon provide you with a high ROI.
Thanks again – we always welcome comments, even if they of a different opinion!
Victoria
4.
Ed Roach | September 9, 2010 at 4:56 pm
Victoria, from a budget and logistical perspective I would agree that those would be benefits.
For me the key benefit of email marketing is that you can tell IF the prospect you target actually opened that email. Until email marketing, there was no real way to determine this. We could be into a semantics argument, but “putting the message under a nose” is very hard to do in many circumstances.
Nice discussion here at your blog by the way.
Leave a Comment
XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>
TrackBack URL | RSS feed for comments on this post.