How do I track communications consent (Opt In) for CASL and GDPR?

The Canadian Anti Spam legislation and the EU GDPR exposes businesses to stiff penalties for sending commercial messaging to people who have not explicitly opted-in.



ActiveDEMAND provides marketers the tools to help with CASL and GDPR compliance.

It is a best practice to only send emails to those people who have explicitly given permission. This is done with ActiveDEMAND by using the 'Opt-in' survey field in your forms.





All contacts who check this field when submitting a form have their permission logged with a timestamp. This permission can be revoked at any time by a client via an unsubscribe (again logged). In your campaigns there is a checkbox that, if checked, will only send emails to those folks that have an opt in status set to true. Opting in overrides previous unsubscribe actions.


In your Administration => Account Settings you can enforce double opt in (i.e. explicit consent) by enabling the 'Enforce double opt in'. Setting this in the master account will expose a checkbox on all campaigns that, by default, will only send emails to those that have given consent (i.e. an opt in flag).





Once this setting is enabled in your account, you can use the checkbox in your campaigns:





You can also add a link or a button for Opt In in your emails built in ActiveDEMAND platform.

Use the dynamic term %STATIC_OPT_IN_LINK% to create an Opt-In link:





When your prospects click the link/button, they are automatically redirected to a standard "Thank you for Opt In" page. This page can can be customized according to the instructions given in this article: How do I customise the Opt In page?


Using these features will reduce any exposure to CASL or GDPR fines significantly.

Updated on: 07/12/2022