Permission-Based Marketing with Pardot

There are many good reasons to have email laws and regulations, but you need to know how penalties can affect your company and make sure you’re doing your due diligence. In this article, we will explain the current legal environment that b2b marketers need to be aware of and which Pardot features you can use to comply.

Permission-based email marketing

In Pardot email automation, we have to be especially careful that we are following all the relevant laws. Pardot requires all of its users to follow its permission-based email policy, meaning that emails are “requested, anticipated, personal, and relevant.” Following this policy will help keep your account in good standing with Pardot and will generally keep you out of legal trouble.

Here are the Pardot permission-based marketing best practices that will help you navigate the complicated legal environment in email marketing:

• Email those who want to be contacted by you: Only email prospects who have opted-in to receive emails from your company. One way to ensure compliance with Pardot is to have a check-box at the bottom of your forms to ensure that they read your permission-based marketing policy and agree to its terms.
• Make it easy to opt-out: Pardot will not let you send an email if you don’t have the %%Unsubscribe%% link in the body of the email. Make sure that the unsubscribe link is easy to locate on the email template.
• Be Transparent: Identify who the email is being sent from and include your address and contact information at the bottom. 
• Be honest: Don’t write misleading subject lines, they should know that the content is commercial before they open it.
• Monitor your email deliverability: Make sure that the prospect emails that you are sending are consistently reaching your prospect’s inbox. Pardot encourages you to have a 90% deliverability on all your emails and will send you a firm reminder if you don’t.

Commercial email laws were put in place to curtail the rampant levels of email spam selling products and services, and which is a blessing for us as consumers but a headache as marketers. It’s particularly overwhelming as a marketer because every country–even some states and provinces–have their own laws and requirements in place for commercial emails.

Legal Compliance by Country

We’re marketers, not lawyers; but let’s look at how these countries’ laws vary:

Ultimately, if you should take away one thing from this section, it’s this:

Understand that sending commercial emails to residents of other countries is a big deal and something you need to be prepared to deal with.

If you’re looking for more information, here are some resources to look over:

• USA’s CAN-SPAM Act: A Compliance Guide for Business
• Canada’s Law on Spam and Other Electronic Threats
• UK’s Guide to Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations
• Australia’s Anti-Spam

If you know you’re going to be doing business in the European Union, Pardot has a feature that will create a cookie consent pop-up on your website, and Pardot is smart enough to know based on IP address whether or not to display that pop-up.

The GDPR and other EU data privacy directives can get very complicated very quickly. We thought it would outside the scope of this article to get into details of it.

Here are some resources that elaborate further on the EU’s data privacy and communication protection laws:

• The Beginner’s Guide to the GDPR

This content piece provides a rough overview of international laws that affect email marketing. Under no circumstances should this be taken as legal advice. If you are seeking legal advice, consult an attorney.