Just when you thought it was safe to turn your back on political email skirmishes, Ready for Ron (RFR) challenges the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) in Federal court over not being allowed to give a list chock full of email addresses to a candidate. Now before you get excited to imagine that the FEC and the court cared even a tiny bit about the privacy of the email addresses, they didn't. What they cared about, and what the FEC opinion letter and subsequent case turned on, is the value of an email address or, more precisely, the value of a list of contact information of 200,000 people, including email addresses. And both the FEC and the court cared enough to hold that the value of that list exceeds the maximum allowed contribution to a candidate by a single entity.
So you want to be (or are) an SMS Marketer. As you navigate the ever-changing landscape of digital marketing, it's crucial to understand the SMS marketing legal landscape and SMS marketing laws and best practices. One key thing that SMS marketers in the U.S. often overlook, but which actually requires your attention, is the Federal Do Not Call (DNC) list. The thing is, checking the DNC list is not only essential (in fact required by law), but it can actually increase your ROI, and benefit your customers and your business! Here's how.
Here's a random question that we were asked "We just got an email with an unsubscribe link going to kmail-lists.com; who is behind kmail-lists?" It turns out that it's pretty hard for at least the average person to figure out who is responsible for the kmail-lists.com domain; the ESP behind kmail-lists.com is Klaviyo, who is an ESP for primarily B2C businesses, in fact they are a primary competitor to Shopify, who used to dominate the B2C ('business to consumer') and D2C 'direct to consumer') ESP space.
Microsoft will start honoring p=reject DMARC policies for incoming email which does not pass a DMARC check when the associated DMARC record designates a policy of p=reject. This affects inbound messages at Microsoft Outlook email addresses, Microsoft Hotmail email addresses, Microsoft Live email addresses, and MSN email addresses.
Not confirming email addresses can put your customer in physical danger, and can cause you legal liability if they are harmed. We've written before about how not confirming email addresses can potentially create real-world, real legal liability, because in certain settings, and particulately in ecommerce, it can actually lead to your customer suffering physical harm; maybe even death.
There is a lot of confusion over what exactly qualifies as "legitimate interest" under GDPR. Additionally, you may be wondering whether GDPR governs the handling of personal data which you collected before GDPR went into effect and, if so, whether you can keep it under the legitimate interest test. The answer is both 'yes' and 'no'. Below we talk about the legitimate interest test generally, and how it applies to data acquired before GDPR went into effect. We also include information about how to obtain the model legitimate interest assessment (LIA) template which has been developed by a GDPR expert and which we have been given permission to share.
