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It’s important to note that a message designed to obtain consent is itself a CEM under CASL. This means that if you do not have implied or express consent before July 1, 2014, a message of this nature will violate the law.

Here are the steps you need to take now to not only better prepare your business for CASL, but also improve your outreach and marketing efforts:

Check out your current contact listDetermine if you have express or implied consent to send CEMs. If you don’t have consent, they probably aren’t qualified leads to begin with. Look at this as opportunity to clean up your list and ensure it consists of only qualified leads that are more likely to purchase from you.

Re-engage cold leads with an email asking if they still want to receive CEMs from you, and provide an easy way for them to consent while taking the opportunity to ask for other relevant information, such as confirming what they are most interested in hearing about or if they have any questions you can answer.

Work on getting express consentbefore July 1One way to accomplish this is to email existing contacts asking them to provide their consent, while indicating the value to them of receiving CEMs from your company. You can offer incentives such as coupons, discounts, free audits or services, and so on to get that consent.

Adopt the inbound marketing methodologyInbound marketing is focused on attracting prospects by providing great content. People voluntarily sign up (read: explicitly opt-in) to receive content and marketing materials from your business, meaning that from the beginning, you have their express consent to send them CEMs. Furthermore, many marketing automation systems used to track and deliver inbound marketing have list validity confirmation features, which enable you to ensure you have obtained consent via a series of checks.