By Tom Wozniak, Head of Marketing – published on Forbes.com on 5/26/21

With the emergence of the internet, marketing truly went global. Suddenly, it was feasible and even easy for advertisers to reach people around the world as easily as in their own backyard. This is certainly true when it comes to email marketing. 

While this easy global reach brings huge opportunities for email marketers, it also creates challenges. These challenges include adapting to audiences that communicate in various languages, accomodating cultural differences across countries and regions, identifying varied product and service needs, and numerous others. However, one important challenge that doesn’t always get a lot of attention is understanding and complying with varied regulations and laws that provide guidelines for marketing to recipients in different countries. In the United States, the rules for email marketers are explained in The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, which has been providing clear guidance for sending commercial emails for nearly two decades. 

This topic has gained even more attention in recent years with the advent of data privacy laws around the world that impact the ways in which companies can market to consumers, how they can target those consumers and their responsibilities around handling the data they collect. One example of this was the implementation of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the European Union in 2018. However, GDPR is far from the only data privacy legislation that has come into existence in various countries around the world in recent years. Because it’s possible for email campaign recipients to reside in various parts of the world — which means marketers communicating with them are subject to different rules and regulations — it’s important for email marketers to consider laws and regulations beyond just those in their home country. Note that I am not a lawyer or legal professional, and no information in this article should be taken as actual legal advice. I always recommend that companies obtain professional legal guidance on matters pertaining to industry regulations or legislation, such as CAN-SPAM or GDPR. However, I do have a few tips to offer from a marketing perspective.

Read the rest at Forbes.com.

Tom Wozniak heads up Marketing and Communications for OPTIZMO Technologies.