Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL (formely Bill C-28), effective since July 1st 2014, regulates email communications and defines the exact circumstances in which you are permitted to send messages to your contacts. The main consequence of this law is that you now need consent from the recipient in order to send them a message of a commercial or promotional nature.
There are two types of consents:
- Express consent - The contact agrees directly to receive your messages, either by submitting a subscription form or by speaking with you on the phone or in person.
- Implied consent, You obtain this consent following a request for a quote or other information, a business transaction such as a product purchase, or by similar means. Under the law, implied consent has a time limit of six months for information requests and 24 months for purchases.
The burden of proof rests with the sender of the message. At the time of sending, you must be able to confirm that you have the recipient’s consent. The recipient has up to three years after receiving the message to lodge a complaint. Consequently, you must keep their consent on file for at least three years.
To facilitate management of these consents, the Dialog Insight application offers two features:
Opt-in management
The opt-in management module is offered as an option and must be activated to have access to it.Opt-in management lets you create specialized opt-in fields to control your contact subscription preferences. Once this module is activated, you will also be able to create rules in your communication types to control which contacts are eligible to receive messages of which type, and opt-outs from these messages will affect individual subscriptions instead of deactivating the contact entirely. This module also keeps a complete audit of all opt-ins and opt-outs in your contact profiles.
Implied consent management
The implied consent management module is offered as an option and must be activated to have access to it.
Activating this module lets you create implied consents and rules that govern them.
To help you comply with CASL applicable rules and legislation, this module will keep historical data and audits that will let you trace any messages that are sent along with associated consents for a predetermined duration (for instance, the CASL requires that a sender demonstrates sending rights up to 3 years after sending a message).