Get Ready for GDPR and Boost Your Email Marketing
GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) is a huge change and you MUST prepare for its implementation in email marketing!
It’s time to get ready for GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation)! Essentially, GDPR is a new set of guidelines which will affect the use of personal data of EU citizens. This is a regulation that involves all clients based in EU regardless of your own location. Therefore, even if you personally don’t live in any of the European Union countries, you’ll still have to follow GDPR.
Before you start getting anxious, the fact of the matter is that this particular change can actually benefit you greatly and help improve your email marketing campaigns. As people get more control over their personal data, you also get the possibility to carry out more transparent and segmented email campaigns. To learn more about GDPR and why you actually need it, keep on reading. Also, you can check the full set of regulations on this link.
Why you should get ready for GDPR?
Whatever information you ask from your subscribers, be it email, name, phone number, home address, and similar, you’re gaining access to their personal data. With GDPR, EU citizens will also gain more privacy and rights. As the penalties for non-compliance with GDPR are now more serious, the whole point of the change is to establish trust with your prospective leads.
GDPR gives the following rights to EU citizens:
The right to be forgotten. Basically, the user can ask at any point in time that the company deletes all of their data from their system. This goes beyond just unsubscribe button.
The right of access. The users have all the right to know why you need their personal data and how you use it. If they ask you directly, you’ll be obliged to provide a detailed report.
Breach Notification. This particular right states that you have to notify all your subscribers and customers about a possible security breach within 72 hours as they have the right to know.
The right of portability. Users also have the right to ask for all of their data as a downloadable file, which means you have to provide it in a common format.
With that in mind, it’s essential that you carefully consider the most important data you need to ask your prospect for. The less data there is, the less hassle there will be as well. However, it’s important to mention that you need to get ready for GDPR 100% since the regulations involve absolutely everything tied to an individual that you may collect, IP addresses included.
Always ask for consent
In order to fully comply with GDPR, you have to ask your prospects for consent so that you can actually use their data. There are two types of consent — active and explicit — and you need to ask for both.
This may seem a bit scary, but in all honesty, it’s a simple, clean and fuss-free agreement. Active consent means that users are the ones to initiate the consent by clicking the checkbox. Explicit consent, on the other hand, involves your own explanation about what the users give their consent for. You need to communicate this clearly for every type of agreement. Of course, make sure to keep the subscribers’ consent forms as proof.
Go through your subscription list
If you have EU citizens on your email subscription list, and even more so in case you’re not sure about this, you have to revalidate your subscribers. Essentially, in order to fully get ready for GDPR, it’s your obligation to go through the list, find the EU citizens and check whether they have actually provided their consent for you to record.
GDPR is a great change because it allows you to show that you care for every subscriber you have. This is the key factor to improving your email marketing strategy. The requirements will apply starting from May 25, 2018.
