Don’t Call Me Ever Again! Complying with Do-Not-Call Laws

Before you begin a telemarketing campaign, you’ll need to know who you can call and who you can’t. In this second of our three-blog series on telemarketing, we help you navigate the rules and regulations around the Do-Not-Call (DNC) Registry. (Read our first blog post, The Dos and Don’ts of Telemarketing, here.)

Under the federal law known as the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission together maintain the National Do-Not-Call (DNC) Registry, where consumers can register their home or cell phones. (Some states also maintain their own separate DNC lists, although many have merged their information with the federal DNC list.) Once a number is added to the DNC list, you have up to 31 days to remove it from your telemarketing call lists. You cannot make telemarketing calls to numbers on the DNC list until the owner of the number removes it from the DNC list or:

• You have an established business relationship with the person (an existing customers, for example); or
• The owner of the number made an inquiry to your company or submitted an application (for example, prospective customers who called your company or filled out a form on your website or at a home show asking for more information fit this exclusion; consumers entering a contest you run do not); or
• The owner of the number has given your company consent for telemarketing calls (more on that below).

You may call people that you have an established business relationship with for 18 months after the customer’s last purchase, delivery, or payment. You can call consumers who ask for information from your company for up to three months.

Under federal law, you must also maintain an in-house DNC list. If a customer or prospect requests that you stop calling, you must immediately add them to the list and stop making telemarketing calls to that number – even if you have an established business relationship with the customer.

You should also be careful with lists of prospects you buy from other companies – you don’t have an existing business relationship with these consumers and they didn’t inquire specifically of your company, so you must scrub these lists against federal and state DNC registries, and your own DNC list.

Both the FCC and the FTC have resources to help companies comply with the DNC registry.