Permission By Design
New features make it easy to respect the rights of your recipients.
The recent changes in EU regulations have offered a good opportunity for us to review our data protection and privacy policies, and make a few updates to how we handle permission-based sending. Security of data, respect of users’ privacy, and preventing spam have always been important to FATdrop’s design and values. We welcome the new changes and are evolving the service to make it easy for clients to receive explicit opt-in permission to send promos to recipients.
You don’t need to do anything. You can continue to send promos. Your recipients will be asked if they want to receive them.
Here’s a summary of the changes we’ve made:
If your recipients have not formally opted-in to receiving promos from your company (e.g. via an invite) a banner will display at the top of your promos asking for permission to use their email address. Note: This will go live on Monday 2nd July. The option to opt out of using this feature is live in your account now.
If you don’t want the banner to display on your promos, you can switch it off in your Settings page — for example, in the case that you have been given permission to send to your list outside of the FATdrop system, or if it does not apply because you don’t send to EU recipients.
A new dynamic tag in your mailing lists allows you to easily filter for recipients that have opted-in.
Have your recipients opted in?
Our policy is (and always has been) to only allow permission-based sending. The basic idea is very simple. Don’t send to people who haven’t asked for it. We monitor for abuse of this policy via simple algorithms to detect high email bounce and unsubscribe rates, as well as monitoring email blacklists and feedback loops from all of the big email providers. We block clients that abuse the policy and manually unsubscribe recipients that repeatedly mark promos as spam. In short, we don’t allow spam via FATdrop.
Until now, we have worked on the assumption that recipients accessing promos constitutes a form of granting permission. Our 3-strikes sending policy (we block sending to a recipient after 3 sends until they access a promo) is a safeguard against abuse of our spam policy.
Our new policy goes a step further and asks recipients for a formal confirmation that they want to receive promos from you — to provide a simple and user-friendly solution to running successful promo campaigns while respecting recipients’ rights.
We strive to make FATdrop the best promotion platform, and, as always, welcome feedback on this or any part of the service.
