The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into force on the 25th May. While many marketing companies have already completed their work to become compliant, it’s important to make sure you’re still thinking about GDPR. You’ll need to make sure that your email marketing is GDPR compliant going forward.

Read on to find out the best practices to make sure your email marketing is compliant with GDPR.

Audit and refine your lists

The first places to start ensuring your email marketing practices are GDPR compliant are your contact lists themselves. Carefully check through your lists and ensure that you understand which legal basis you’re using to contact the people on them. While consent isn’t the only basis under which you can contact individuals, it’s the easiest for most businesses to use, so think carefully about your options.

As well as understanding your legal basis for contacting, it’s a good idea to proactively refine your lists. There are a number of different ways to do this, but the main goal is to remove those subscribers who don’t engage with any of your campaigns for a prolonged period of time. You can also send a re-permission or re-validation email to this segment to allow them the chance to remain subscribed.

By auditing your contact lists, you’ll make sure that you’re only emailing those people who you have a legal basis to contact. Also, you can keep your open rates and engagement rates high by refining your lists. This has the added benefit of reducing your spam complaints and ensuring deliverability.

Check your consent is valid

If you’re using consent as your basis for contacting individuals, make sure that you’re properly recording the details of where and when they opted in. Many email platforms will do this for you automatically, although you should make sure that this is set up correctly and meets your needs.

You’ll also need to ensure that you’ve recorded historical data for when your older subscribers consented to receive your emails.

Allow opt-out

Under GDPR, all of your emails should include a clear and free of charge method to opt-out of receiving marketing emails from you. This is usually placed in the footer of emails.

It’s important to be clear with this link. Don’t try and trick your subscribers by forcing them to opt-out to a lot of different options. You should also allow them to unsubscribe without having to sign in to an account on your website.

Include the correct details in your emails

To be GDPR compliant, you’ll need to include certain details in every email. These include:

  • Your company name
  • Your company’s postal address
  • Details of why the individual is receiving emails from you

Make sure that every email you send includes these details. Many email platforms allow you to create templates so that these details will be automatically included.

Ensure ongoing compliance

Remember that being compliant with GDPR isn’t a set and forget activity. You’ll need to continually review your data and processes to make sure that you’re compliant.

If you change systems or introduce new forms, it’s important to make sure these are also GDPR compliant.

It’s essential that you have systems in place to accurately delete or suppress customers data if they ask you to. You’ll also need to ensure that you can correctly recall all of the data you hold about specific individuals if they make a Subject Access Request to your company.

GDPR doesn’t have to make your email marketing difficult. Just follow these best practices and you can create compliant campaigns that still get great results. If you’re already GDPR compliant and want to partner with Quotatis, join our affiliate scheme here.