[BEST PRACTICES]: GDPR— How Laws Benefit Real Estate Professionals
The colorful world of online engagement, in other words, email marketing can be challenging enough without new, sometimes complicated (and very often dry) laws rolling out. Fortunately, these laws provide a great chance to review your strategy not just to fit with these rules, but also for tackling the gray area that involves your online reputation and practices that’ll land your messages in your prospects’ inboxes.
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is one of those laws that our realtors (one of the smartest and most active email marketers group there is) have questions about because it covers a lot of different areas regarding data and privacy. We’ll focus on the areas covering information gathering, email and how you can be even better than the law requires.
Respecting an individual’s choices
It is not just the handling of personal data that is a concern, but also that you consent to collect and use that data (in our case at Frontdoor such as an email address, place of employment, name and so forth) in a way that accords with an individual’s preferences and choices. And, similar to the previously rolled out Canadian Anti-Spam Law (CASL), keep records of those preferences and choices, in case they need to be evidenced in the future.
Best Practices: Provide your leads with choices around marketing (e.g. obtain opt-ins and maintain a preferences page) and set expectations. Mail filters are getting better and better at detecting what mail is “wanted” by your recipients. A major indicator of this is spam complaints (when a user marks a message as spam in their inbox). And, a major contributing factor to getting more spam complaints is when recipients aren’t clear on why they are receiving that message.
How can you help this?
Be clear that since they visited and inquired about a property on your site that you obtained the address with their consent obviously and what you plan to do with it. After all, that list of 1 million addresses is 1 million human beings who will react the way a human does when they aren’t clear on what they’re receiving from you, and why this process will actually help with their search.
Subsequent opt-outs
GDPR: Again, this has always been an EU requirement and even dates back to CAN-SPAM. Recipients must be provided a method of opting out of receiving further communications. And, this method must be simple and clear to the user. For example, you should always include an unsubscribe link in every email or text that you send.
Best Practices: Remove recipients who have withdrawn consent and consider removing recipients who appear to have stopped engaging with you for a long time. Consent to send messages is not forever. If a recipient agrees to receive messages from you at some point, realtors should consider stopping sending marketing communications at a certain point, even without blatant requests for an unsubscribe or a spam complaint. This is one of the easiest ways to maintain a good reputation.
What about GDPR is new to most realtors?
Age Restriction: GDPR focuses a bit further on parameters around the age that is required for a person to give consent to use or access their personal data. Article 8 states that where consent is being obtained from a person under the age of 16, then parental consent must be obtained.
An organisation must make “reasonable efforts” to verify that the consent comes from the parents, as opposed to the child. We recommend reading further to find out more about how different member states can set a lower requirement of 13 and if that is applicable to you.
We realize that verifying age on an address collection page is new for most marketers and difficult to verify. We, therefore, recommend having a simple policy that prohibits under 16s from registering or using your services.
This law is now heavily enforced so we recommend planning how you plan to adjust for it now. And, in any audits, remember that you can still offer a lot of value to your online leads and obtain a high ROI for your organization even with following the strictest guidelines.
Overall, this shouldn’t punish good and conscious realtors and will help to keep email as a trusted source for everyone to use. It may cause some extra work, but it is a good thing.
Thanks again to everyone who’s joined Frontdoor and supported us so far. We can’t wait for what’s next 🚀
