Business Cards From a Trade Show and CASL

The bowl after the show

The show closed on Sunday afternoon. The booth is packed, the banner is rolled up, and on the office counter sits a bowl holding a couple of hundred business cards from the draw.

The plan was always to type them into the newsletter list, which looks like the best return of the whole weekend.

The people who dropped those cards were mostly thinking about the prize. Very few were asking for a monthly email, and Canada's anti-spam law, CASL, draws exactly that distinction.

Some of the cards can be emailed. Most cannot, at least not yet, and the difference matters before anything goes out.

What CASL asks before a commercial email

CASL covers commercial electronic messages: any email or text that encourages someone to buy, which includes a newsletter with specials in it.

Each one needs consent, express or implied.

Each one must also identify the sender, include a postal address and a second contact such as a phone number or website, and offer an unsubscribe that takes effect within ten business days.

If anyone ever asks, it falls to the sender to show where consent came from. A bowl of cards with no notes beside it shows very little.

Not every card in the bowl is the same

• Customers who have made a purchase within the past two years.
• Visitors who asked for a price or a quote at the booth.
• People whose job involves buying what you sell.
• People who wanted the prize and said nothing else.
• Other exhibitors collecting cards for lists of their own.

The fourth is usually the biggest pile and the weakest. Dropping a card in a bowl to win something is a reason to hear whether you won, not a request for every message that follows.

What handing over a card allows

People in business hand out cards so that others can reach them, and CASL allows for that. When someone gives you their email address without saying they want no messages, consent can be implied.

The limit is relevance. The message has to relate to the person's business role, functions or duties.

A catering menu sent to the person who orders lunch for a forty-person office passes that test. The same menu sent to that office's structural engineer, because his card was in the bowl, is a stretch.

Purchases and enquiries work differently.

A customer who bought in the last two years, or a visitor who asked about prices in the last six months, has an existing business relationship with you, which implies consent for that period.

Asking by email counts as an email

The obvious workaround is to email the whole bowl once, asking who would like the newsletter. CASL closes that door: a message requesting consent is itself treated as a commercial electronic message.

So the request needs a basis too. For the piles with implied consent, a single invitation to subscribe is fine. For the prize-only pile, email is the wrong channel for asking.

Those people can still be asked in person, by phone or at the next show.

A worked example

A shawarma shop that caters office lunches took a booth at a spring business expo in a community arena, with a bowl offering a catered lunch for one office as the prize.

By Sunday the bowl held about a hundred and eighty cards. The owner's first instinct was to add them all to the monthly specials email.

Instead the cards went into piles on the counter. A dozen belonged to existing catering customers, already on the list.

Nine came from people who had asked for a quote at the booth, with notes on the back saying so.

About thirty were office managers, administrators and event coordinators, people whose job includes feeding meetings. The rest came from people who had wanted a free lunch.

The winner got a phone call and an email to arrange the date. The quote requests got their quotes. The office managers got one short email with the catering menu, an invitation to subscribe and an unsubscribe link.

The remaining cards stayed in a box. Next year's booth will have printed entry slips instead of a bowl.

Entry slips that collect consent

Express consent is the clean answer, and a booth is a good place to get it: people are standing in front of you, pen in hand.

Print entry slips with a separate box for the newsletter, left unticked, and words saying what people will receive: monthly specials and catering news by email, for example.

The slip should also say who is asking, with the business's postal address and a phone number or email, and explain that people can unsubscribe whenever they like.

A pre-ticked box does not count. Neither does a sign on the booth announcing that every entrant goes on the list.

A tablet with a sign-up form does the same job, provided it records the date and leaves the box empty until the person ticks it.

Keep the evidence

Consent you cannot show is weak consent. Keep the slips in a labelled box, or scan them, for as long as the addresses stay on your list.

When the addresses go into your email service, record where each one came from: the show, the date, and whether the person ticked the box or was already a customer.

Most email services allow a tag or a note on import. Use it, because in two years nobody will remember which addresses came from the spring expo.

The counter-case

All this matters less for a business that sends no newsletter and only replies, one to one, to people who asked a question at the booth.

None of this is legal advice; it is general information. A business building a large list from events, or running contests as part of its marketing, should have its own approach checked by a lawyer.

For everyone else the rule of thumb holds: sort the cards, email only where there is a basis, and collect consent at the booth next time.

Sorting the bowl

1. Contact the draw winner about the prize.
2. Sort the cards by how you met each person.
3. Answer every quote request from the booth.
4. Email only the piles with a real basis.
5. Record the source and date of each address.
6. Leave the prize-only cards off the list.
7. Print entry slips with an unticked box.

Step seven is the one that turns next year's bowl into a list. Everyone who ticks the box at the booth is a subscriber who asked, and nothing needs sorting afterwards.

Making sure replies from new subscribers reach a real person is covered in the info@ address everyone reads and nobody answers.

Frequently asked questions

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