Skip to main content

Email

Email Marketing: Regulatory Compliance for Financial Institutions

Jason Krumenaker
September 25, 2021
Regulatory Compliance

When you think of email compliance, you might think more about the “who” — as in, who you’re sending to, having the right permissions to send to these contacts, providing an opt-out option, and so on. However, for financial institutions and other heavily regulated industries, the “what” is just as critical as the “who” – meaning, ensuring that the actual content of your emails abides by industry-specific regulations is crucial to ensure compliance.

What is Email Marketing Compliance?

Email marketing compliance means that your organization’s email content abides by regulations set forth by the government. This includes industry-specific regulations, like those for financial institutions, as well as email marketing-specific regulations like the CAN-SPAM Act, CASL and GDPR. Just as your marketing communications must be compliant on the web or social media, they must also be compliant when communicating with consumers through email.

Email communications are directly from your organization to the consumer, arguably making it even riskier than other channels, such as the web. Whether they’re emails sent to thousands or one-on-one consumer interactions, unmonitored communications can leave you exposed to tremendous risk. Emails must be truthful, non-deceptive and fulfill all regulatory obligations. Failure to do so can lead to costly penalties and damaged reputations.

This also includes third parties operating on your organization’s behalf. Sending messages with deceptive subject lines, not having an unsubscribe link, and not including an address can all put your organization at risk–even if you aren’t directly sending the email yourself. Your organization assumes the risk of what third parties do and say on your behalf. Ensuring complete brand and regulatory compliance by partners and third parties is an essential part of sound email marketing compliance.

Benefits of Monitoring Marketing Emails

Monitoring for compliance with applicable regulations by employees and partners can provide your organization with several benefits such as:

  • Avoid enforcement actions and protect your brand by catching potential compliance violations before they’re in the inboxes of consumers
  • Identify your top performing agents (and any that are underperforming) by monitoring their performance and compliance
  • Ensure that approved marketing copy hasn’t been altered by monitoring & evaluating the pre-launch experience
  • Identify corrections in training, such as updated training manuals or templated responses, by looking at common compliance observations
  • Verify partners’ adherence to regulatory and brand guidelines by monitoring third-party communications

With PerformLine’s Email Monitoring solution, easily review and score your sales, marketing and partner emails to ensure complete regulatory and brand compliance. Learn more about how we can help by speaking to one of our experts today.

Stay Updated

Join thousands of other industry professionals

Subscribe to receive the latest regulatory news and updates with a focus on marketing compliance via content offers, newsletters, blog posts, and more
This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Connect with PerformLine and see what we can do for you.