Email Marketing for the sake of Transparency
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For the record, my email marketing strategy is based partially on the CA state budget and general fund. It went from having large deficits to being flushed with cash in part because they went after the top earners in the state of California and raised their taxes.
Applying that same kind of logic I created an email list that is made up of the people in the CA State Legislature who make at minimum $120,000 which is the salary of the Senators and Assemblymembers and about 400 additional staff members. There salary information is easily accessible as a public document from the Senate and Assembly websites. I simply added their names to my email generator which is an excel spreadsheet I created that generates the list of emails. It is the only information I have collected as a business. The other emails of people on my email list were taken directly from publicly available websites.
The public nature of their jobs makes the rules and regulations about email marketing that exist in the private sector to private citizens more grey and blurry then normal businesses.
For example, if you publicly put your contact information online that is in a way giving random visitors to that website consent to contact you.
The California Legislature also has something called the "Consent Calendar" which is a process of passing non controversial bills without discussion or debate, these are usually resolutions like wishing Mothers a Happy Mother's Day in May, or something similar. Legislation can get off the consent calendar if someone objects to it, but nobody in the state legislature wants to be the guy that forces all his colleagues to vote on something because they have a minor objection and want to rant for 5 minutes before being the only person to vote against something everyone else has no issues with. So legislation on the consent calendar gets passed.
With that all said I am sure there are some people on my email list who probably think I am violating some kind of law by adding them to my email list.
1. I am not a large enough business that needs to follow the CCPA, or the California Consumer Privacy Act, my LLC and me as the sole business owner who has a few hundred dollars in sales a year, is not a business that meets any of the following 3 requirements:
- Have a gross annual revenue of over $25 million;
- Buy, sell, or share the personal information of 100,000 or more California residents, households, or devices; or
- Derive 50% or more of their annual revenue from selling California residents’ personal information.
2. Information that is publicly available is exempt from the protections of the CCPA.
- If the information is exempt from the CCPA. This includes:
- Publicly available information (such as your address, which is often in public real estate/property records). However, if you are a law enforcement officer, public official, or Safe at Home participant (available to victims of domestic violence, stalking, sexual assault, human trafficking, elder and dependent abuse, as well as reproductive health workers), you may request a website to not publicly post your address as described here.
- Certain types of information such as medical information or consumer credit reporting information.
My business does not collect sensitive information or collect any personal information that is not accessible from a public website as part of public records. I also do not publicly post the email addresses on my website, the names of the individuals are exempt from the protections of the CCPA because it is public information due to the fact their job title, name, and salary is a matter of public record.