Your Complete Guide to the Compliance Process

As a bulk email delivery service, our most important job at TouchBasePro is to bring you a reliable service with great deliverability. 

As a shared service, this means we need to ensure that everyone is playing by the rules, to minimise any impact one customer's behaviour may have on another.

One of the ways we achieve this is through our Compliance Approval Procedure. Approvals are a normal part of sending email through an email service provider, and are designed to help:

• Keep spammers at bay.
• Ensure everyone is following best practices for email content and subscriber growth, and following the laws that govern email marketing.
• Safeguard the sending reputation of all customers who use our service.

All first-time senders will go through a Compliance Approval Check, where we will need to check your opt-in methods, previous sending habits and statistics and give your content a once-over. 

How to prepare your account for sending

Approvals can also be triggered based on the number of subscribers you're sending to. The point at which they trigger is different for each account and can change based on how long you've been sending with us. Your account may need to be approved more than once during your time sending with us, depending on how rapidly your audience grows.

There are other situations which might trigger an approval, such as abnormally high bounce or complaint rates, but the procedure is much the same, and our team will help you through.

Turnaround time for approvals is faster if your account, subscriber list and email content are already in good shape beforehand. For a higher chance at a speedy, successful approval, follow the guidelines below.

Legal Requirements

Make sure that you follow all applicable legal requirements (for example, POPIA, GDPR, CAN-SPAM etc.).

Some of these laws require you to add specific things into your content (covered further in this guide).

Other laws govern things like your opt-in methods and subscriber activity tracking.

If you are unsure if you are compliant or have any questions, please reach out.

Subscriber Requirements

For subscribers, we check the following:

• How you sourced them.
• Whether they opted into your communications voluntarily.
• Interactions they may have already had with your emails, so we can advise you on the current health of your lists.

To make sure that your email address collection methods comply with our Anti-Spam policy, you'll need to provide us with:

• All the different ways you collected email addresses. For example, did some come from in-store sign ups, and some from your website? Are they paying customers?
• Written or digital proof of permission. For example:
  • URLs or screenshots for online subscribe forms.
  • Scanned examples of offline signups.
  • Copies of confirmed opt-in by personal email correspondence.

And, of course, make sure your database is loaded and ready to go in your account. 

Content Requirements

We take email content seriously, as a spam complaint against your emails can affect other customers on our service.

When you set up your campaign for us to review, we recommend following the content guidelines below to help minimise spam complaints, and to put you in a great starting position for when you need approval. We'll get back to you after the initial review if we require any content changes.

Make sure that:

• Your email content complies with our acceptable use policy.
• Your email content matches your subscribers' expectations for the type of content they signed up for.
• Your emails contain the sender's name and physical address.
• You include a permission reminder that clearly explains to the recipient how or why they're receiving your emails.
• You clearly identify who you are in your emails. The "From" name and email address should accurately identify the person or business sending the email, and your subject line should make clear to subscribers what you're sending to them.

Avoid:

• Content about third-party products or services that subscribers did not actively sign up for
• Difficult to find or hidden unsubscribe links.
• Content that resembles spam, such as subject lines full of "FREE! WIN! SALE!" or image-heavy campaigns with very little text content.
• Irrelevant content, or content that doesn't match your subscriber's expectations. 

Reporting Requirements

In order to check the overall health of your marketing and your lists, we ask that you provide reports from your previous email service provider so that we can advise if any additional issues need to be addressed before sending through TouchBasePro.

When submitting your compliance check, attach reports from your previous email service provider that show:

• open rates
• click rates 
• bounce rates
• unsubscribe rates