As a publisher, the customer’s privacy should be one of your top concerns. You should frequently be thinking about ethics—since you are “invading” the customer’s mailbox you should at least play by the book—and keep in mind that disgruntled customers can seriously hurt your business relatively easily. Here are the main privacy considerations you should consider when emailing your list.

Permission comes first. It goes without saying that if you buy a list of emails at $0.50 CPM from a shady service you will be flagged as a spammer. The email list is a valuable asset for any marketer and no one in their right mind would sell a genuine, double opt-in email list, at least not for pennies. If the deal looks too good to be true, you are probably looking at a scam.

Your privacy policy should be easily accessible. Trying to “hide” where it is or not having one at all is a sucker bet. People want to know what you plan on doing with their email address. A good practice is to also include a link to your Privacy Policy with every email you send out. All changes should be communicated immediately.

Name each third party that will have access to your list. If you use an external ESP to deliver your emails, make sure you mention it. Same goes for inserting tracking pixels in your messages, if they are handled by a third party company or even by a service of yours that’s running from another domain. Ad serving companies might run their own analytics systems, so make sure you link to their privacy policies as well. If you are mailing out on behalf of another publisher, make sure you disclose it.

Run an in-house audit on your privacy policy at least once a year. Determine if the terms still match against your current practices and your customers’ needs so that you can modify it where needed. Post an update on your site to remind your customers that their email addresses are safe with you.

Remind your customers how/when they signed up to your list, together along with providing an easy to find  unsubscribe link. People often forget when or how they signed up and reminding them should keep the number of complaints down to a bare minimum. Don’t simply tell them that once upon a time they signed up with your company, give them specifics, especially if/when you are promoting a third party product. As a side note, you could link your customers to a control panel where they can adjust their preferences—for example, allowing them to switch from daily deliveries to weekly summaries.

Avoid using pre-checked permission boxes if possible. There is no doubt that pre-checked boxes will result in higher acceptance than having the user tick the agreement box initially, yet spam complaints can get considerably higher if you automatically check the box for the user. There is no universally correct answer for each and every situation, you will need to figure out on your own which one suits your current needs best.

Follow these easy guidelines and you will be able to build and maintain a valuable email list.