Digital privacy laws are essential in today’s time, but how do marketers ensure that they are not violating them unknowingly? Perhaps, the line is very thin for falling into the privacy breach category as small things like not mentioning disclaimer at the end of your message known as footer compliance lead to penalties. You need to practice effective email for marketing strategies while still negotiating the laws.
Email for marketing: be effective and still respect privacy
A lot of businesses choose to hire HTML email developers due to stringent digital privacy laws. However, we will discuss how to employ effective digital marketing tactics that save you from landing into legal troubles. If you are in doubt, whether you are following the industry best practices or willing to start afresh, read this article to know more about the topic.
Collect User Information With The Consent Of Recipients
While gathering user information for email for marketing, ask for the consent of subscribers. You can include a checkbox with a statement like “I allow the company to send marketing emails” in the opt-in form. When they allow you to send emails, you have to maintain a record of their permissions. Mailchimp developers can help you create opt-in forms that obey GDPR laws. The average spam rate sits at 0.02% in 2019.
Accumulate Information That You Intend To Use
Digital privacy laws allow marketing campaigners to gather the data of recipients with their consent and use it for business promotion such as email for marketing, but collecting data that is needless is considered a violation of laws. Many cases have happened in the past where a company has collected unnecessary information and invited legal proceedings for themselves.
Don’t Share Or Sell Recipient’s Data
Sharing the data of users without their permission is a violation of digital privacy. Sharing the data with other companies for business purposes can attract penalties to you. If you share, you will be held responsible for any malpractice done by another company, so it is better to abstain from the same.
Choose Third Party Service Providers Carefully
Marketers must ensure that third-party service providers adhere to GDPR and CAN-SPAM laws in email for marketing. If a third party violates the laws, then legal action can be taken against the company involved in email marketing. Make a contract with only those service providers who value data privacy, secrecy, and data protection.
Include A Way To Opt-Out Of Receiving Future Emails From You
The digital privacy laws of most countries have laid out guidelines for email for marketing campaigns to safeguard internet users’ interest. Email marketers must include an option to opt-out of the contact list without levying any charges, and the opt-out is crucial to effective email marketing. The digital laws also notify businesses to keep the process short and straightforward.
Respond To Opt-Out Requests Quickly
As per the law of CAN-SPAM, you have to process the recipient’s request to unsubscribe within ten business days as part of your email for marketing processes. The process of opting-out must not include any step except sending an email or visiting a web-page. A majority of Mailchimp certified specialists create email templates conforming to data privacy laws owing to the ESP’s powerful toolkit. The average unsubscribe rate was a mere 0.2% in the last year. In the following example, Beta List shows how they made a formal unsubscription confirmation email as a way to win back the subscriber with the Toy Story image:
Don’t Mislead The Recipients With Header Information
Header information refers to ‘subject’, ‘from address’, ‘to-address’, and ‘name’. The effectiveness of email for marketing campaigns is decided based on the open-rate of emails. In order to increase open-rate, marketers write misleading information to lure the attention of subscribers. To protect the interest of users, digital laws consider it malpractice.
Note – Being creative with the subject line to draw the attention of recipients is not punishable.
Mention A Valid Postal Address
The digital privacy law stipulates to mention valid postal in your promotional campaigns. This guideline is a part of ANTI-SPAM Law; hence, it ensures the delivery of emails in inbox (not in spam). You can include a post box address or street address. In modular templates, you can specify the address at the bottom of emails.
Transparency In Data Collection
When you collect the user’s data for email for marketing, explain to them in clear and simple language the information you will store and how you will use the same. The law demands marketers to make information regarding storing and using the data easily accessible to subscribers.
Data Audit
In cases where data collecting (Business enterprise) and data processing (Third-party) entities are different, then according to GDPR laws, business firms involved in email marketing have the opportunity to execute data audits to review the process of data collection and sharing with a view to confirm compliance with laws.
Wrap Up
Throughout this article, we have mainly focused on one thing: follow the expected code of conduct. While there are guidelines to differentiate between privacy breaches and other malpractices, if you simply follow the ideal code of conduct expected out of a brand, you would most probably never end up violating any law.
As we saw above, all of the malpractices are rooted in deceiving recipients in the name of genuine value exchange. Keeping your word and promoting transparency helps build meaningful relationships with your subscribers and uphold your legal safety. I hope that you find this article useful for employing effective email marketing that abides by digital privacy laws.
