Stay Compliant with the Canada Anti-Spam Law (CASL)

Mailchimp's signup forms, audiences, and emails can help you manage Canada Anti-Spam Law (CASL) requirements. If you're in Canada or send a Commercial Electronic Message (CEM) to Canadian residents, you’ll need to comply with CASL.

This article is provided as a resource, but it’s not legal advice. If you have more questions, we encourage you to contact a lawyer in your area who is familiar with this issue. And check out our article About the Canada Anti-Spam Law (CASL) for more information.

Required email content

CASL requires that you include a few pieces of information that are clearly and prominently displayed in each email you send. This information is typically shown in the footer.

• The sender's name and/or company name
• The sender's physical mailing address
• The sender's contact information, such as a phone number, email address, or website URL.
• An unsubscribe mechanism, such as Mailchimp's unsubscribe merge tag

There are additional requirements when sending an email on behalf of another person.

Luckily, Mailchimp's email templates include a Footer that pulls all the required content into the email with merge tags.

First, you’ll use the audience dashboard to add or update your sender info. Then, if you use the classic builder, use the email builder to verify or update your unsubscribe options.

Update your email footer content through the audience dashboard

To update your sender info in the email footer, follow these steps.

1. Click Audience, then click Audience dashboard.
2. If you have more than one audience, click the Current audience drop-down and choose the one you want to work with.
3. Click the Manage Audience drop-down and choose Settings.
4. Click Required email footer content.
5. Edit fields as needed and click Save.

Check your unsubscribe merge tag link in the classic builder

Most footer templates already contain the unsubscribe merge tag, *|UNSUB|*. If you're using the classic builder, take a quick look in the builder to verify the tag is there. If it isn't, follow these steps.

1. In the Content section of the email builder, click Edit Design.
2. On the Design step, click the footer block.
3. In the editing pane, enter the tag *|UNSUB|* or choose the Unsubscribe Link option from the Merge Tags drop-down menu.
   
4. Click Save & Close.

If you send a lot of emails, or have several users on your account, you may want to add the required information to an email and reuse it, or create a template. To make sure your merge tags display the right information, check out About Email Footers.

Send a consent email

If lots of people in your audience have only given you implied consent to receive your messages, you'll need to ask those contacts to explicitly opt-in to receive your Mailchimp emails. Under CASL, a request for express consent is a Commercial Electronic Message (CEM), so make sure that you have authority to send the opt-in request.

There are a few steps to sending a consent email.

• Create an express consent group in your audience
• Add required content to your Update profile form and Signup form
• Create an Update profile email
• Segment your audience for compliant subscribers

Create an express consent group

To create a consent group, follow these steps.

1. Click Audience, then click Audience dashboard.
2. If you have more than one audience, click the Current audience drop-down and choose the one you want to work with.
3. Click the Manage Audience drop-down and choose Manage contacts.
4. Click Groups.
5. Click Create Groups.
6. On the Groups page, click As checkboxes.
7. Enter a clear, concise description into the Group category field. Descriptions can be up to 48 characters.
8. In the Group names field, enter "I consent" or a similar statement.
9. Use the minus icons to remove extra group names.
10. Click Save.

Great job! Now you can import contacts to these groups or click Done for now.

Add required content to forms

Your name, contact information, and a description of the messages that will be sent must appear on both your Signup form and Update profile form. You must also include a statement that the recipient can withdraw their consent at any time. If you’ve published a preferences center to replace the Update profile form, you'll need to update that too.

To add required content to forms, follow these steps.

1. Click Audience, then click Signup forms.
2. Scroll to the Form builder tile, then click Manage forms.
3. If you have more than 1 audience, click the Current audience drop-down and choose the one you want to work with.
4. In the Forms and response emails drop-down, choose Signup form or Update profile. Be sure to repeat these steps to update both forms.
   
5. On the Build it tab, click edit in the form’s header field to open the editing window.
   
6. In the Edit Your Content pop-up, enter the purpose of your request for consent, a description of the purposes for which consent is sought, the types of messages that will be sent, your contact information, and a statement that recipients can unsubscribe at any time.
   
   Here are examples of acceptable consent from the Compliance and Enforcement Information Bulletin (CRTC). It's up to you to make sure that your consent complies with CASL.

You may also want to edit your Update profile email and Update profile "thank you" page to reflect CASL's changes.

Create an Update Profile

After you've created the consent group and updated your forms, it's time to create an email whose primary focus is a link to the Update profile form.

Build an email as you normally would, and use the merge tag *|UPDATE_PROFILE|* as the link for text, an image, or a button somewhere in your email. We'll replace the merge tags with a URL of the subscriber's update profile page anywhere the merge tag appears. To add the merge tag, edit a content block and enter the merge tag into the Web Address (URL) field for the text, image, or button you want to link.

Preview and test your email as you normally would, and send it to your entire audience. We'll automatically filter out anyone who isn't a subscribed contact.

To get the greatest response from your subscribers, you may need to send your Update Profile email a few times. You might want to create an A/B Test to test the most effective day or hour, to help you make the most of each send.

Each time you send the Update Profile email, be sure to segment your audience. Remove anyone in the new consent group as well as new subscribers who signed up after the date you updated your signup form, so you don't ask them to consent twice.

To send through Mailchimp, all audiences must be clean and current, so we suggest only sending to contacts who have opted-in to receive email communications in the past 12 months. Sending to older contacts often generates many bounces, unsubscribes, or abuse complaints, which can result in account suspension and even possible complaints to regulators. You can use a third-party service if you need to clean your audience before using Mailchimp.

Segmenting in the Future

To comply with Mailchimp's Standard Terms of Use, you can only send emails to subscribers who have given express consent. To do this, bulk unsubscribe all subscribers who aren't in the consent group and who signed up before you updated your signup form. To remain in compliance and keep a healthy audience moving forward, you should remove out-of-date subscribers no later than one year after you start the signup or cleaning process.

Export proof of consent

To get proof of consent data, just export your audience. If you only want to see who's in the consent group, view or export segments of your audience. You may also want to keep a copy of your signup form, in case you need to prove that the form included all of CASL's required information.

When you export your audience, look for these columns on your CSV file.

• OPTIN-TIME: If double opt-in is turned on, this column will display the date and time the contact clicked the link in the opt-in confirmation email.
• OPTIN_IP: If double opt-in is turned on, this column will display the IP address when the contact accessed your hosted signup form.
• CONFIRM_TIME: When the contact originally clicked to subscribe to your marketing.
• CONFIRM_IP: The IP address from which your contact confirmed their subscription.

Mailchimp tracks this information through your signup form, so we can't use it for subscribers you import. To be safe, you should also have proof of consent for imported subscribers in a separate document or in hidden text fields in your Mailchimp audience.