What is GDPR, and Why Is It Relevant to Email Marketing?
GDPR, which stands for General Data Protection Regulation, is a European Union privacy law that communicates the rights of persons regarding the handling and protection of their personal data.
Knowledge and compliance with EU GDPR are critical for anyone in email marketing. These rules will determine when you can email a person and what you may do with their email address or other identifying information.
Here are some significant highlights of GDPR you must know as an email marketer:
- You must have explicit consent from the email address owner to send them emails
- Your emails must contain a clear and simple way to unsubscribe from future messages
- You must honor all unsubscribe and opt-out requests swiftly
- The person has the right to access their stored data at any time
- The person has the right to request deletion of their data
- The person has the right to object to how you process or use their data
All of these listed items are immediately relevant to anyone sending marketing emails. These rules effectively make businesses responsible for securing and organizing customer email data responsibly. When businesses take greater care of their email data, there's less chance of a person's email data being misused or stolen in spam attacks or phishing scams.
What are the penalties for not complying with GDPR in email marketing?
Violating GDPR, whether through accidental or intentional means, is a criminal offense and comes with severe financial penalties. However, minor infringements with no prior violations may result in a warning.
As a rule, the penalties for violating GDPR are proportional to the nature of the offense. For severe offenses, the punishment is a multi-million dollar fine or a percentage of the company's prior year's fiscal earnings, whichever is higher.
Honor your email subscribers' GDPR rights to build trust
Understanding and complying with GDPR is also essential for earning the trust of your subscribers and customers located in the EU.
Your company has both an email sender reputation (determined by internet service providers) as well as a word-of-mouth reputation that will follow it online. If you fail to honor GDPR law, you can expect to experience a higher volume of spam complaints, more bounced emails, and lower email deliverability.
In addition, customers are less likely to do business with a company that doesn't take customer security and privacy as seriously as they should.
Complying with EU GDPR not only maintains public trust but will improve your email sender reputation with ISPs as well as your email deliverability. All will positively impact the results and ROI of your email marketing efforts.
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