Successful email marketers get permission to send emails to their subscribers and potential customers.
As a certified sender, you are expected to stay within compliance metric thresholds related to complaints, spam traps, unknown users, and blocklistings in order to receive Certification benefits. When people don't opt into your email program, complaints, unknown users, and spam traps increase while deliverability rates decrease. When the compliance metric thresholds are exceeded, your IP address or domain may be suspended, and Certification benefits are temporarily lost until the thresholds are met.
Allowing subscribers to opt in helps you to stay within compliance metric thresholds as well as helps identify yourself to mailbox providers as a more trustworthy and legitimate sender.
Requirements
Certified senders only send email to people who want it. To make sure you are doing this:
- Only gather subscribers who opt in through acceptable forms of consent
- Tell subscribers what email they will receive and what you will do with their email addresses through a clear and conspicuous disclosure statement and privacy policy
- Be able to provide proof of consent, including the date, time, originating IP address, and location (for example, a URL) where you collected the address, upon request
Although some laws allow senders to legally send email to people who have not opted in, others may not, including the Certification standards.
