Most advisors think of Canada's anti-spam legislation as something that applies to marketing departments. It applies to you the moment you email a client about a product, a rate, a renewal or a review — because those are commercial electronic messages, and the law does not care that you already have a relationship.
Which of your emails are commercial
A message is commercial if one of its purposes is to encourage participation in a commercial activity. For an advisor, that catches more than you would expect:
- A quote, or a comparison of options.
- A renewal reminder that mentions continuing or changing coverage.
- An annual review invitation.
- A birthday greeting from your practice — because the practice is the sender and the relationship is commercial.
- A note about a new product or a rate change.
What is generally not commercial: a message that completes a transaction already agreed to, such as a document-signing request, a confirmation of something the client asked for, or a response to their question. These are transactional, and the consent and unsubscribe rules do not apply to them in the same way.
Consent: express or implied, and both expire
Express consent is the client saying yes, in a way you can show later. Implied consent arises from an existing business relationship — a purchase or contract in roughly the last two years, or an enquiry in the last six months. Implied consent is the one that catches people out: it runs out, quietly, on a date you have to be tracking.
The practical rule: record for every client which kind of consent you hold, when it was obtained, and how. If it is implied, know the date it lapses. If you cannot answer those three questions for a client, do not email them anything commercial.
Every commercial message needs three things
- Your identification. Who is sending it, on whose behalf, and how to reach you — a mailing address and at least one of a phone number, email address or web address.
- A working unsubscribe. Easy to find, working for at least sixty days, and acted on within ten business days. A link that a security scanner can trigger by accident is a problem of its own; a link that shows a confirmation button is safer for everyone.
- Consent on file before it is sent, not after.
What to keep
If a complaint is ever made, the burden of proving consent is on you. The record that answers it is not complicated, but it has to exist at the time, not be reconstructed later:
- Which consent you relied on, obtained when, by what means, and by whom.
- A copy of each commercial message as sent, with its date, recipient and the unsubscribe link it carried.
- Every unsubscribe request and the date it took effect.
The mistakes that actually happen
They are rarely dramatic. A birthday greeting goes to a client who unsubscribed last year because the unsubscribe was recorded in one place and the birthday list lives in another. A review reminder goes to a family whose implied consent ran out eight months ago. A quote is forwarded from a personal inbox with no identification block. Each is a small thing, and each is a contravention with penalties attached.
The fix is structural, not behavioural: one system that holds the consent, the expiry, the suppression list and the sending, so a message to a client without consent cannot be sent at all. That is how Clientaly handles it — consent per client with expiry, an unsubscribe on every commercial message that suppresses the address for that advisor, and a copy of every message kept against the family. If you use something else, check that it can do the same.