Is Your Marketing Above Board? Common Illegal Marketing Mistakes Small Businesses Make

With so many services and products being offered on the Internet, you may not be unaware if your marketing crosses the legal line. Here is a quick overview of common small business marketing mistakes that are actually illegal.

Marketing Emails–CAN-SPAM Act

When emailing your leads, customers, or potential customers, it’s important to comply with the email regulations of the CAN-SPAM Act. Any communication beyond a one-on-one email (e.g., group emails, broadcast emails, or newsletters) must have an unsubscribe option; you must honor those unsubscribes and cease to email them.

You also cannot obtain email addresses in any other fashion than by collection/receipt (people give their addresses to you.). You cannot buy, rent, or harvest emails. While, legally, you are free to collect emails from around the Web (contact pages or directories), it’s still distasteful to do so.

CAN-SPAM also specifically states that an email subject line must not be misleading in any way. Besides, sending misleading emails that trick or disappoint is a sure way to lose customers’ business or support anyway. And one of the most classic of all small business marketing mistakes is to focus on the short term (selling off your remaining inventory) than the long term (cultivating a loyal and supportive customer base).

Image Usage–Copyright Laws

When choosing images (or infographics) for your blog and website, you cannot merely save and then upload any old image from the Web or a Google image search. This is especially important if you are creating marketing materials that promote your business or sales, like flyers or advertisements. Image copyright laws apply to your website, blog, social media posts, and even your emails.

Legally, it is up to you to track down and understand an image’s usage rights (free-for-all, editorial only, or pay per use…just to name a few). Use online tools like Picscout to easily check for any copyright and licensing information, including duration of use, geographic location or industry restrictions, and to even obtain permission.

If you are using user-generated content, content that’s submitted or shared by your “users” (and a great marketing tactic when done right), be sure you have the appropriate “Terms of Use” in place before you repurpose and share it to your site for your own means. If you plan to use content (someone else’s images or words) for an advertisement to sell your services, you’ll need to inform people how you would like to use their content, and then get their “explicit” permission.

On social media, the rules are even more specific. Even if an image was shared publicly on social media, the photographer still maintains full legal rights to it (2013 case Agence France Presse v. Morel). You can only legally “re-share” an image to the same network it was originally posted to.

Customer Data Collection

The biggest laws concerning this topic are the Fair Credit Reporting Act (1970) the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (2010). These laws govern just what consumer reporting agencies can and cannot collect, ensure accuracy of the information, and require agencies to notify a user if they take adverse action based on the collected information.

You will always be held legally responsible if customers’ data is stolen or bought from you. It is also always illegal to collect information about customers if they are unaware you are doing so–as in if they cancel their account but do not disconnect it, and you continue tracking and collecting.

Small businesses commonly run into customer data collection problems when collecting information from their social media followers. Given the many “social media insights” services available, it can be easy to inadvertently collect improper customer data. Small business owners should also be aware that just having customer data could put them at grave risk for a data breach and an embarrassing publicity fall out.

While the law is pretty murky, it’s also generally good practice to avoid collecting any information on minors, or data that isn’t explicitly listed in a profile.

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