Email Marketing in New Zealand
Since 2007 when the Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act 2007 came into force, it has been illegal for NZ businesses to send unsolicited commercial emails to people,(referred to as SPAM) who hadn’t previously agreed to receive them.
However from our own experiences, many businesses are still unaware of the laws, and are carrying out some very poor practices when managing mass email communications. This topic is therefore for the benefit of our own clients, many of whom are businesses, that use mass email communications for their business.
We decided to write about this topic, after recently receiving a flurry of unsolicited emails from NZ companies that we had never heard of. When we contacted some of these businesses, and asked where they got our details from, they had no record of where our email address was actually sourced from. But they promised to remove our email address from their database. That should have been the end of it, but in several cases we continued to receive unsolicited email from them. Some of them had no automated way to remove us from their database. Others failed to provide any contact details or subscription information in the emails they sent us.
