General Data Protection Regulation regulates the collection and processing of personal information of EU residents. This provides EU residents with complete authority over their data.
According to GDPR, EU residents have the
right to know that their personal data is being collected and processed, update their personal data, and request to restrict the processing of their data (removal of their data from the database).
As this law is crucial for marketers who have contacts in EU, Zoho Campaigns provides a
set of features that ensures that contacts are collected and processed according to the GDPR regulations.
In this document, we discuss a few points related to GDPR and its related features, which might help you to get more clarity about GDPR compliant marketing.
Updating your email marketing type to be GDPR compliant will not remove or erase your existing contacts. You can get consent from your existing contacts by sending
consent emails.
Clarity in purpose
The main intent of defining purpose is to let your contacts know the type of emails they are likely to receive by consenting to a topic or list. You should be clear in defining the purpose and stick to that purpose alone.
If you've defined your purpose as Product Updates, then you cannot send other types of emails like marketing or promotional emails for lists defined under that purpose.
If you want to send different types of emails, you can choose multiple purposes and associate different lists with different purposes. It is recommended that you maintain a separate list for each purpose so that your contacts will receive the emails relevant to the topics they chose.
Legitimate Interest
Legitimate interest is when you know that a customer or recipient is genuinely interested in receiving marketing emails from you. It is one of the most used lawful data processing bases. However, it is necessary to ensure if a purpose actually falls under this basis. If you're not sure if you can process a contact under this data processing basis, you can verify it using Legitimate Interests Assessment (LIA).
LIA template is designed to help you to verify if your purpose really comes under legitimate interest basis. You can get a sample LIA template online and modify it as applicable to your business. LIA helps you check if you're legally correct in choosing this processing basis. It is ideal to have an LIA file for each purpose and upload it while you're creating a purpose which has legitimate interest as the data processing basis. You can create a segment for all consented contacts. Create a segment and set the criteria as "Consent Status" is "Expressed". If you want to create segment only for consented contacts in a particular list the you can add a “List" in "list name” criteria with the consent criteria.
If you've obtained a generic consent from your customer which includes consent to receive both sales and marketing emails, then you can transfer a contact's consent from Zoho CRM to Zoho Campaigns or vice-versa,
- When you sync consented contacts from Zoho CRM that consent is accepted in Zoho Campaigns for the above mentioned case.
- When you push consented contacts to Zoho CRM, you can push the consent status obtained in Campaigns by creating a custom field in Zoho CRM.
If your contacts have given specific consent to receive either marketing or sales-related emails respectively, then make sure to get explicit consent for the other purpose,
- If you've got the consent only for sending sales related emails to CRM synced contacts, then you have to get separate consent from those contacts to send marketing emails.
- If the contacts have consented to receive only marketing emails, then you may have to get separate consent in CRM to send sales related communication.
To get a detailed idea of different consent related cases,
click here.
There is a concern among marketers about sending consent emails to the existing list whenever new contacts are updated. The concern is "Will the consented contacts receive this consent email again?" Well, the answer is 'No'. When you send consent email to any list, Zoho Campaigns checks the purpose of consent email and doesn't send consent mail to contacts who've already consented for that purpose.
However, if there is any change in the purpose or if a new purpose comes into the picture, then the consent mail is sent to those contacts.
Beyond all the regulations and law, it is always preferable to send emails to contacts who are genuinely interested. This practice is ideal for you and your contacts.