Email Marketing is one of the most influential marketing strategies that provide high ROI, almost $38 for every $1 spent as per Hubspot. However, since GDPR has come into effect, businesses need to be cautious with their marketing operations because of the stringent rules. GDPR aims at providing extended data rights to users and monitors the way businesses use their customer data. With our data protection solutions, marketers can change the way they seek the consent of users to receive business emails.
In this blog post, we have compiled a list of 5 GDPR compliant strategies to ensure effective email marketing.
Tips to practice GDPR compliant Email Marketing
The GDPR regulations apply to businesses located within the European Union, as well as those that target the EU citizens. As GDPR strengthens the security of user data, it is essential to practice marketing strategies in compliance with it. In addition to getting consent from users, below are some actionable tips to ensure that your marketing campaigns stay compliant.
Segment Email Lists
Segmenting email subscribers list can improve the output of your business emails. Also, segmentation complies with the GDPR, as your email campaigns become specific to the target audience. A HubSpot study reveals that email marketing KPIs perform better on segmenting the email list.
Email marketing platforms have easy to segment lists, that enable businesses to personalize emails by interest, location, and engagement level. Knowing customers’ preferences adds more value to emails as you can communicate ideas in a better way. Hence, segmenting the email list can increase conversions, leads, transactions, and revenue.
Few examples to get started with segmentation:
Segmentation by Industry: If you offer services or products to a particular industry, you can segment email campaigns based on its userbase.
Segmentation by Company Size: Segmenting email campaigns based on company size or annual revenue can increase engagement.
Segmentation by Sales Cycle: Segmenting customers based on their purchase history to target them with suitable email campaigns like industry white papers or free trial offers.
Include A Call-to-Action (CTA)
CTAs encourage visitors or customers to perform an action on a website. Emails with a clearly visible CTA have a high engagement rate. Delivering valuable information via emails is essential for engaging customers and persuading them to subscribe to your email or newsletters.
Understand the preferences of your customers and include CTAs such as “Sign Up”, “Join” or “Visit”. Motivate customers by keeping them hooked to the email campaigns by designing it around the CTA.
Gain Email Permissions and New Opt-Ins
Prior to GDPR, businesses used to add users’ emails to their list which they obtained via pop-ups or web forms. However, since GDPR has come into effect, it is necessary for businesses to obtain permission from users to send them promotional emails. It is a significant step in securing critical email data of users and preventing spam instances.
Pre-ticking a box or hiding communication policy in privacy statements is an illegal practice now. GDPR specifies various rules wherein users have to explicitly opt-in to receive email newsletters from an organization.
Provide Opt-Out Feature
As per GDPR, businesses can send their marketing emails only to those users who have voluntarily subscribed to it. If in the future, any user wants to opt-out from receiving marketing emails from an organization, he must be able to do that. It is, therefore, essential for businesses to provide an ‘unsubscribe link’ at the bottom of their emails to comply with GDPR.
The unsubscribe link should be clearly visible and not hidden in their email marketing templates. Opting out from the email subscription should be hassle-free for the users as per the law.
You can use a template from the list below:
- To stop receiving emails from us, click here.
- Click here to unsubscribe from all [company] newsletters.
- Unsubscribe from all newsletters
- Don’t want to receive emails from us anymore?
Personalize Email Addresses
For encouraging email recipients to check marketing emails, it is essential to for senders to specify their names for a personal touch. The “from” field is one of the main reasons that users open an email. A professional email address can build trust with the customers as it creates the right impression. Also, a free email address questions the credibility of a company and puts the customer in doubt.
So, it is recommended to test email campaigns with a person’s name, or person and the company’s name, or from your CEO himself. Send emails only to those recipients who have chosen to be in your subscription list.
Concluding Thoughts
After the GDPR, businesses have to be cautious while acquiring and using customer data. The new regulations provide better control to users or customers over their data and email marketing strategies must comply with it. Data protection solutions are necessary to ensure that businesses are practicing marketing strategies in compliance with GDPR.
Formulate GDPR Compliant Marketing Strategies With Our Data Protection Solutions
We, at Oodles, enable businesses to maintain the privacy of their users’ data. Our data protection solutions safeguard the critical user data collected by the companies.
Connect with us to ensure data protection and privacy of your organization.
