Reasonable Spread Newsletter

Hong Kong like many other open economies is vulnerable to the problems caused by unsolicited electronic messages ("UEMs"). How can we carry out email marketing legally?

The Ordinance covers electronic messages sent over a public telecommunication service for advertising, promoting or offering goods or services.  These include pre-recorded voice messages sent to telephones, text messages, faxes and emails on the internet.

The Ordinance prohibits "address-harvesting and related activities" and other illicit activities related to the sending of multiple commercial electronic messages.

The Ordinance implements the following rules to be observed by senders of commercial electronic messages:

a. Provide clear and accurate sender information.
b. Provide unsubscribe function free of charge.
c. Honour the do-not-call registers.
d. Not to use misleading headings in commercial email messages.

If you want to know more about the Unsolicited Electronic Message Ordinance, please click "Read More".

Online Opt-in (get permission)

Acquisition and use of harvested address list are prohibited by the Ordinance, hence, it is very important to get consent from recipients. The best way to encourage opt-in is to publish a subscription form (shown as below) on your website. Furthermore, Spread users can easily build up this subscription box by following instructions.

Offline Opt-in

Remember to get consent from recipients by informing them that they will receive promotion items or latest news about your company when they obtain their email. The same case applies to exhibition, put a notice states that "To receive news and updates from us, leave your name card here." when you collect business cards. If you do not know how to create a permission form, you may click here to have some ideas.

Double opt-in

To avoid entering other's email address, a confirmation email must be sent to email owner to verify the subscription so as to guarantee the email that you obtain from subscription box is dropped by the email owner. However, this may reduce the subscription rate as subscribers need to confirm the subscription to your organization. Double opt-in link can be created in your campaign when using Spread. You can enable double opt-in here only if you have problem in your single opt-in email list.

Unsubscribe link

An unsubscribe link must be included in any electronic messages to allow subscribers to opt-out their subscription. It is not effective when you provide unsubscribe link by asking subscribers to send you back an email for cancellation. Auto deactivation is a more automatic and convenient way for subscribers and your company. This one-click unsubscribe / cancellation is provided by Spread in every outing emails.

Permission reminder

Subscribers sometimes are forgetful as they forget their subscription to your company. A better practice is to add a permission reminder in email to inform them the reason why they receive your company email. For example, by adding "You received this email because you signed up as a member of ABC company" in email.

Accurate sender information

Accurate sender information, for example, physical address and phone number etc must be included in any commercial electronic messages. Your information has been submitted and it is going to display when you are creating campaign at the Message Body.