Email Marketing Compliance:
What you need to know in 2024

With a clear and descriptive subject line, so your email recipients know exactly what they’re clicking on. This generally improves user experience, but it’s especially helpful for people who use assistive technologies to understand an email’s relevance to them.

Use sentence case in the subject line and preheader, and add punctuation at the end of the preheader. Otherwise, it may read as a run-on sentence if it picks up more copy from the content in the email.

Adhering to the correct order of headings (<h1>, <h2>, <h3>) in your HTML email makes it easier for those who receive them to understand the structure and hierarchy of content appearing within the email.

This is helpful (and often necessary) for people who use screen readers or have certain disabilities that make reading more challenging. Headings are also helpful for all readers to understand information hierarchy.

Make your email content readable and understandable to aid individuals with cognitive disabilities and enhance readability for all recipes. 

This means avoiding jargon, technical terms, and industry-specific abbreviations that might confuse readers. Opt for common terms and phrases that your audience will readily understand.

Write clearly, using proper grammar and punctuation.

Ensure all link text indicates to readers what the link is about. For example, “Learn more about how our services can help you” is a meaningful link text, whereas “click here” isn’t. 

Generic link text also doesn't perform as well as a more thought-out one, which can hurt conversions. 

Read more on Accessible Hyperlinks.

Add enough spacing around letters, numbers, words, and blocks of copy to reduce clutter and make the content readable. Squishing content together and making the reader strain to read your message will turn most people away before they even begin to read your email. 

Your emails need to pass the "glance test." If reading your content using the glance test is hard, you might need to add more spacing.

Not everyone can see all colors, see a color as the same color as you, or easily differentiate one color from another. If you rely solely on color for buttons, links, important information, or conveying any information, your readers won't be able to read or interact with your email or graphics.

Bold important information and underline links to help readers navigate through your content.

You can design an email that appears perfectly on a laptop or computer, but it's not going to look the same on mobile devices or be legible enough to read when fonts are shrunken to fit.

Create email templates that allow resizing for smaller screen sizes, resized fonts are big enough to read correctly, and layouts that keeps their intended order.

Ensure your email doesn't scroll left-to-right to avoid causing a poor user experience for everyone.

By ensuring your content is easy to read, you not only assist readers with visual impairments but also enhance the overall user experience, a fundamental principle in Marketing 101. 

Select legible fonts easily read when resized or presented with different styling or spacing. Consider a font's family, size, spacing, and color.

Sans-serif fonts with consistent widths, such as Arial or Verdana, are more easily read than a fancy serif or script font.

Read more on How to Select Accessible Fonts.

Add descriptive yet concise "alt-text" (or alternative text) on any images with text in them, or describe the image if the graphic is essential to your message so that people with vision impairments can understand your message when using screen readers. 

Always start your alt-text with a capital letter and end it with proper ending punctuation.

Add a blank alt attribute (alt="")  to images that assistive technologies don't need to read, such as dividers or other images used purely for layout purposes.

Emojis "🙂" are Unicode graphical images that display emotions, thoughts, and ideas.

Emoticons ":)" are textual punctuation marks, letters, and numbers. They look like emotions when placed near each other, but screen readers will read them as their literal text.

When including special fonts in your email, include their Unicode attributes to render emojis.

Always test to make sure your email-sending client and inboxes support emojis, or they can appear broken (☐) in your reader's inboxes. 

Creating an HTML email template with the following attributes can save you a lot of time when making your next email:

Include the language (lang="en" or lang="es" etc.) attribute inside the <html> tag to tell screen readers what language to read your email in. 

Add role="presentation" to all <table> elements used for content the subscriber needs to read and on images with an empty alt-text to avoid the name of the image being read.

Add the aria-hidden="true" attribute to images that should be hidden from screen readers.

Double opt-in is when individuals need to confirm their email address before being added to your email list and receive email communication from you. It is the double confirmation of their subscription to your newsletter or any services needing their email details.

Consent messages need to be easily understandable to individuals. Practices such as pre-ticked opt-in boxes and confusing or vague language (double negatives or inconsistent language), disruptive mechanisms are banned by the Regulation.

You need to keep a record of how you obtained the express consent of the data subject. That includes the data subject who gave the consent, when the consent was obtained (data and time stamp, for example), and the specific purpose for which the consent was given.

You should review consent data regularly to check that the relationship, the processing, and the purposes have not changed, and consider using privacy dashboards to make it easy for individuals to update their consent preference. Any consent withdrawal requests should be processed as soon as possible and records kept.

Users have the right to:

1. Be forgotten; be informed; have data deleted; a copy of their personal data (within a month, free of charge);

2. Data portability – data electronically in a commonly used format;

3. Object; Halt; and

4. Decision-making and profiling.

You should include the visible unsubscribe link in each marketing email where your subscriber can:

1. Unsubscribe to this marketing communication

2. Unsubscribe to all of your communications

3. Contact a return email address

You can only sell your marketing list if you have the specific consent of each individual to do so. This cannot be hidden in your privacy policy that is hard to find, difficult to understand, or rarely read. 

Pro-Tip: The best way to get consent is to provide a separate opt-in box for each company you intend to share with to give the individual greater choice and to target your group’s marketing more effectively.

People have the “right to be informed” when you collect and use their personal information for direct marketing purposes. 

You must do the following: 

• Explain why you want to use their information (eg to send postal marketing, to profile their buying habits). 

• Tell them if you intend to share their information with other organizations for direct marketing purposes. 

• Make them aware of their data protection rights (including the right to object to direct marketing). 

• Provide this privacy information to people at the time you collect their details.

• If, at a later date, you want to use the information for other activities, you must give them further privacy information.

You must implement appropriate technical and organizational measures to ensure that, by default, only the personal data necessary is processed, which includes: 

• The amount of personal data collected. 

• The extent of their processing. 

• The period of their storage and their accessibility.