Cyberimpact - CASL Making Negative Impact on Businesses

Blog.exclaimer.com reported during fourth week of June 2015 stating that Cyberimpact, an email marketing firm, in its recent survey has found that the Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) which came into effect last July is having a negative impact on Canadian businesses.

Cyberimpact surveyed 500 clients out of which more than 60% respondents believe that CRTC has failed to provide sufficient information about the law to small and medium-sized businesses. Businesses still lack guidance on how to comply with the law in spite of round of sessions on information.

The law is also so complex that even legal experts do not agree on how to interpret parts of it.

The message conveyed to companies is frequently unpredictable. CASL has frightened Canadian businesses with fines of up to $10 million: 10% of those surveyed have stopped sending commercial email altogether and another 30% have cut their distribution lists.

Moreover, almost half (48%) of businesses said that CASL thwarted their ability to compete with their US counterparts. Many wrongly believe that U.S. companies are not subjected to the legislation.

Marketingmag.ca published a report during fourth week of June 2015 quoting Patrick Tremblay, Sales and Customer Service Manager of Cyberimpact, as saying "I feel that the biggest hurdle for clients is the misunderstanding about the legislation. Several SMBs either do not know how to revise their practices and believe that it will be too much work to do so or think that there is too much risk involved. As a result, 10% of businesses in the study said that they had put an end to email marketing completely (as mentioned in the above case).

However, there is no doubt that CASL has been fruitful as spam emanating from Canada dropped 37% globally after the law was passed, claims Cloudmark.

The hammer has not actually fallen yet for companies which are guilty of spam. Since the law became effective, the CRTC has only levied two penalties - one against Quebec corporate training website Compu-Finder for 1.1USD million and another against dating website PlentyOfFish for 48,000USD. Since there have been a huge 310,000 complaints from customers submitted by FightSpam.gc.ca from the time it launched, there may be several other investigations still in the process.

» SPAMfighter News - 7/15/2015