Selling to both US and UK customers means following two different sets of email marketing rules at the same time, and the two systems do not just differ in the details. They start from opposite assumptions about consent.
The US Approach: CAN-SPAM Act Basics
The US operates on an opt-out model. You are generally allowed to email someone commercially without prior permission, as long as you give them an honest sender identity, a non-misleading subject line, your physical address, and a working unsubscribe link that you actually honor within 10 business days. It is permissive by design, but the penalties for ignoring the unsubscribe requirement are real and enforced.
The UK Approach: PECR and UK GDPR
The UK works the opposite way. Under PECR and UK GDPR, you generally need clear, informed consent before sending marketing emails to individuals, with a narrow exception for existing customers marketing similar products (known as the “soft opt-in”). Pre-ticked checkboxes do not count as valid consent, and consent has to be as easy to withdraw as it was to give.
The Core Difference: Opt-Out vs Opt-In
This is the single most important distinction to internalize. In the US, silence is generally acceptable until someone opts out. In the UK, silence is not consent, and sending unsolicited marketing email without it is the violation itself, regardless of how easy you make it to unsubscribe afterward.
What This Means If You Sell to Both Markets
The safest practical approach is to build your list to the stricter standard everywhere: genuine opt-in consent, a clear description of what someone is signing up for, and an unsubscribe link that works instantly, not just eventually. It costs you a slightly smaller list in the short term and saves you from managing two separate compliance systems, or worse, applying the more permissive one to UK subscribers by mistake.
Practical Compliance Checklist
Whichever market you are emailing, get these right: a real sender name and address, a subject line that matches the content, a one-click unsubscribe that is processed promptly, a record of when and how each contact consented, and a privacy policy that actually describes what you do with the data. None of this is complicated once it is built into your signup flow, and all of it is far cheaper to set up correctly than to fix after a complaint.
See our own CAN-SPAM and GDPR pages for how we apply these rules to our own newsletter.
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