What is CASL and How to Ensure Your Lead Generation is CASL Compliant

In terms of lead generation, compliance with regulatory requirements is not just good practice, it’s a legal requirement. There are different laws and regulations based on where you live that you need to be aware of. If you’re in Canada, you need to be familiar with CASL, or the Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation. Understanding CASL and ensuring your lead generation follows its guidelines is crucial for maintaining trust and avoiding legal repercussions. Before we jump into ensuring your lead generation is CASL compliant, let’s dive deeper into what CASL is. 

What is CASL?

CASL, or Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation, came into effect on July 1, 2014. In the last few years, the emphasis on creating anti-spam content has become even stronger. The purpose of CASL is to regulate emails, texts, and certain social media messages to reduce spam. CASL applies to anyone who sends electronic messages for commercial purposes, as long as the recipient is in Canada. In order to follow CASL, marketers must obtain explicit consent from recipients before sending them messages. 

Ensuring CASL Compliance in Lead Generation

Achieving CASL compliance requires proactive planning of your marketing efforts. Here are a few ways you can ensure your lead generation strategies follow compliance regulations:

Obtain Explicit Consent

It’s important to obtain consent from your prospects before adding them to your contact list. This consent should be freely given, specific, and explain what you are going to do with their contact information. An example of this is a cookie banner. This gives the user the ability to accept or deny whether or not they are going to be tracked on your website, allowing for remarketing or website visitor identification via cookies.

Provide Clear Information

When seeking consent, clearly communicate the purpose for which you’re collecting the information and how you will use it. You can do this directly on your forms, or in your privacy policy. Transparency builds trust and ensures that recipients understand what they’re signing up for. Additionally, you’ll want to keep detailed records of consent, including when and how it was obtained. This can be done in most CRMs and can be helpful in the event of an audit.

Include Opt-Outs

It’s important to give your contacts the option to opt out or unsubscribe from your messages. You can also offer an option to reduce the number of messages that your prospects receive to try and retain them. But, ultimately they need to be able to select to entirely unsubscribe. Now that you understand the ins and outs of CASL, let’s go over ways to generate leads that are CASL-compliant.

CASL Compliant Lead Generation Techniques 

While maintaining CASL compliance is non-negotiable, there are ways to generate leads safely. 

Gated Content

Using gated content, like eBooks, whitepapers, or webinars is a great way to generate CASL-compliant leads. This is because your prospects willingly surrender their contact information in order to access the piece of content. You should ensure that the gated content is valuable and relevant to your target audience, and not easily found with a Google Search. When you promote gated content, you should communicate the benefits of accessing the content, and provide a compelling reason for prospects to download. 

Webinars and Events

Try to host webinars, workshops, or events related to your industry to generate leads. Promote these events through your website, social media channels, and email newsletters, requiring attendees to register in advance. By requiring attendees to register, you are obtaining their explicit consent to receive event-related communications and relevant content afterward. For example, if you run a webinar that discusses lead generation, you can send your attendees a follow up with an eBook talking about a similar topic for them to continue learning.

Website Visitor Identification

With the help of Visitor Queue, you can identify the companies that visit your website through a form of IP address reversal, similar to Google Analytics. However, through multiple public sources, we are able to provide more in-depth information about who is visiting your website. Since this information is available publicly, through LinkedIn, websites, or other sources, it is entirely CASL compliant. Additionally, we recommend adding a section to your privacy and/or cookie policy giving a brief description as to what you are going to do with the information you collect, and allowing an opt-out option. With the help of Visitor Queue, you can discover the companies that are on your website, and reach out to them via the contact information we provide. Try it for free today with a 14-day free trial. 

LinkedIn

There are a ton of different ways to use LinkedIn to generate compliant-friendly leads. On your personal page, you can connect with relevant people, engage in content, participate in industry groups, and even use LinkedIn’s InMail feature for direct outreach. On the other hand, using your company’s LinkedIn, you can offer resources like whitepapers or webinars, or use paid advertising to collect information.

Offer Assessments

Assessments or interactive tools that provide insights can be a great way to collect contact information for qualified prospects. Require your prospects to submit their contact information to access a tool or receive their results of the assessment, with a checkbox saying they agree to be contacted further. This can help you generate leads and get more information about what they are struggling with. Here at Visitor Queue, we use a calculator to help leads see how many leads they can generate with our software, requiring contact information to see their results.

Contents or Giveaways

If you’re looking for a fun and exciting way to generate CASL-compliant leads, you could try to run a contest or giveaway. You can run the contest on your social media to encourage participation. Clearly communicate the rules and terms of the contest, including how the collected information will be used. Giveaways can be as simple as a one-month free trial of your platform, or as complex as a trip. 

Opt-In Forms

Using opt-in forms on your website is a simple yet effective way to collect contact information from visitors on your website. With forms, you can attract blog subscribers, free trial users, and general contact inquiries. Clearly outline what your prospects can expect to receive and how often they’ll hear from you. Below is an example of a blog subscription form that we use. Once a new subscriber joins, we add them to our list to receive weekly newsletters in our CRM.

Leverage Your CRM

When generating leads is your main goal, your CRM should be your best friend. Your CRM will be able to track new contacts, put them into appropriate workflows, and automatically recognize when someone unsubscribes. This makes managing your leads a lot easier and ensures that your lead generation efforts are CASL-compliant. If you’re looking to choose or improve your CRM, take a look at our article How to Pick a B2B CRM Software For Your Business. 

What’s Next?

As you can see, there are a number of ways to ensure your lead generation is CASL compliant. For Canadian companies, or companies targeting Canadians, it’s crucial to ensure that you are transparent about how you’re using the information you collect. And, you provide an accessible way to unsubscribe if users no longer want to be contacted. As always, if you have any questions about using Visitor Queue to generate CASL-compliant leads, do not hesitate to reach out.