The purpose of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is to compel marketers to be more thoughtful, transparent, and respectful of the data they collect and use. Realistically, that means marketers need to take a step back - to stop personalizing every piece of information without regard for what is appropriate for the consumer.
GDPR gives the power to consumers to control the use of their data. Any European consumer can call out any company and ask the company to account for the data they've collected and how it's being used.
To master marketing in post-GDPR world, Gartner analyst Bryan Yeager has said that marketers should elevate the importance of privacy as part of their data-driven initiatives. "Audit your current marketing activities, including what data has been collected and how it's processed. Co-ordinate closely with your legal and privacy teams about your approach. And think about how you can use a pivotal moment like GDPR as a way to engender value and trust in your future engagements with customers", he suggested.
It's very concerning to know that a very whopping 41% of marketers admit to not fully understanding both the GDPR law and the best practices around the use of consumers' personal data.
To quickly check if you're complying with GDPR today, see if you can answer 'Yes' to the following:
You've built privacy settings into the digital products and websites - and have them switched on by default.
You regularly conduct privacy impact assessments, strengthen the way you seek permission to use personal data, document how you use personal data, and improve the way you communicate data breaches.
To put it simply, if you have a list of leads, you can't send them a promotional email UNLESS they have given you consent for it. You can't even send them an email asking if they want to hear more from you, and as such, is a violation of GDPR.
In August 2016, Flybe sent an email to 3.3 million people in their database with the subject line "Are your details correct?". In theory, this sounds like a smart strategy, but unfortunately, these 3.3 million people had previously opted out (unsubscribed) to marketing emails and thereby gave no consent to be contacted. Result? A fine of 70,000 pounds.
Key takeaway: If your customers have opted-out of marketing emails, don't email them - it's as simple as that. You're breaking the law if you do.
Best practices to keep yourself GDPR compliant
1. Signup Forms:
Don't assume a person wants to receive your future offers just because she made a purchase. Don't assume a person who opts-in for a newsletter subscription also wants all your marketing materials. And please - remove all pre-ticked boxes that seek permission for future contact from your emails.
Consent must be very clear, and the retailer must keep records of consent under the GDPR's accountability principle.
As a marketer, it will be your responsibility to make sure that your users can easily access their data, and remove consent for its use, in line with the right to be forgotten.
This can be as simple as including an unsubscribe link within your email marketing template and linking to a user profile that allows users to manage their email preferences (as shown in the example below).
3. Take What You Need
Marketers get greedy when it comes to getting formed filled out by customers. We tend to ask for information that we might not even require. Ask yourself, do I really need to know someone's favorite holiday destination before they subscribe to our newsletter? Probably not.
To stop the collection of unnecessary data, GDPR requires you to legally justify the processing of personal data you collect. Don't worry - this is not very complicated.
What this means is that you need to focus on the data that's really useful to you, and stop asking for the "good to haves". If you really need to know a piece of customer information, and can prove why you need it, then you can continue asking for it. But try to avoid collecting any unnecessary data, and stick with the basics.
Actionable tip for GDPR-compliant marketing
Data collection: If you still buy mailing lists, it's probably a bad idea to continue. In fact, you should dump the data you bought right away, because a single complaint from a customer about a breach of consent can subject you to a penalty of up to 4% of your gross revenue. Instead, start fresh. Find new ways of collecting opt-in data by introducing clear, brief web-forms.
Scan your list: Go through your data list periodically and remove the data without an record of opting in. For new subscribers. make sure that they want to receive emails from you by sending them a re-confirmation email after they opt-in for a mailing list.
Content marketing: Content is more important than ever in a post-GDPR world. Since you can only send your communications to interested people, you need a lot of content to generate that interest. Also, you can ask customers to subscribe in order to access content like e-books, infographics, webinars and whitepapers.
Pop-ups: Invite website visitors to add themselves to a mailing list by launching a pop-up on your website. The conversion rate of pop-ups is only around 3%, but like other marketing communications such as emails and Facebook ads, if the pop-ups are launched at the right time with the right message, they can give you a higher conversion rate of up to 40%.
Data storage: In a data-conscious world, you cannot afford to keep records in a spreadsheet and manage the data manually. You need a CRM application where you, and your sales team, can keep updating the data and centralizing your data collection. Of course, CRM applications come with a lot of other benefits as well.
Social selling: Since reaching customers over email is subject to some legal restrictions, find new ways of reaching out to them outside the scope of the GDPR law. Educate your sales team on social selling and connecting with customers on social media sites. Social media will also give your salespeople some perspective on your customers and help them approach with the right message.
Push notifications: You may also take a shot at push notifications. These are pop-ups that seek permission from website visitors to send them promotional notifications. One advantage of this is that once the customer allows you to send them push notifications, they will receive notifications from you even after they have closed your website. One disadvantage of push notifications is that they cannot be personalized, since IP addresses are anonymous.
Privacy policy: Update your privacy statement to let people know that you are GDPR compliant. Mention what you do with customer data you collect and that you don't engage in any practices in violation of customer privacy.
Conclusion
Remember, GDPR hasn't been enacted to stop marketers from communicating with customers. Quite the opposite, actually. It's designed to increase the quality of customer data. The best and most resourceful marketers are seeing the bigger picture and recognizing that it's an opportunity to personalize messages for their prospects and customers, rather than using the traditional one-size-fits-all approach to marketing.
The rules of GDPR compliance are quite simple: don't contact someone unless they specifically ask you to. Don't assume they want to hear from you. Don't cold contact them, and don't send them irrelevant information that they didn't request. If you can do all that, then you've done your job in complying with GDPR.
Congratulations! You've finally set up that e-commerce store you've been thinking about for a long time. Hopefully it wasn't too difficult. Even if it was, the effort will be totally worth it when you start seeing some orders come through. Now that the store is live, let's take a look at some marketing tips you can apply for sales growth. 1. Avoid cart abandonment If you've ever shopped online, you might have added a product to the cart but then decided not to purchase it. This is known as cart abandonment.
Consumers across countries are increasingly spending more time on a wide variety of digital activities, right from online grocery shopping, to video conferencing, to tele-medicine. There is a good chance that you performed one or more of the following activities during this lockdown, thanks to COVID 19: Cooked a meal Made a TikTok Video Signed up for a remote learning session Consulted a doctor online (or ordered medicines online) Shopped for groceries online A study by Hunter, a food and beverage
According to a behaviour survey, 68% of the buyers use sources such as blogs to evaluate the product even before considering it. Before buying a product, we do a lot of research to learn more about the product through communities, blogs, social media,
Webinars are good educational resources to gather qualified leads for your product. But what if your visitors are dropping off from your webinar landing page without signing up? What more could you do to convert visitors into registrants? This is the
Do you think there's any truth to this? Do features only tell, and benefits sell? Well, let's see why we should focus on benefits rather than features as the great marketing wizards, David Ogilvy and Steve Jobs proved to be the best examples leveraging
Hi, I have set up a Supervisor Rule in Zoho Desk to send an email alert when a ticket has been on hold for 48 hours. Is there a way to change it so that the alert only sends once and not on an hourly basis? Thank you Laura
Hello everyone! Welcome back to another week of Kaizen! This week, we will discuss yet another interesting enhancement to Queries. As you all know, Queries allow you to dynamically retrieve data from CRM as well as third-party services directly within
I'm trying to create a PDF export of data in the CRM. My problem is I want a pretty complicated format for the data. I'm trying to export multiple modules worth of data, with nested one-to-many relationships between the modules. Along with that, I want
Our organization would like to start logging calls in our CRM; however, with 13 fields that can't be removed, our team is finding it extremely cumbersome. For our use case, we only need to record that a call happened theirfor would only need the following
Hello! My team is so close to using Zoho Desk with just the keyboard. Keyboard shortcuts really help us to be more efficient -- saving a second or two over thousands of tickets adds up quickly. It seems like the keyboard shortcuts in Desk are only for
I have a journey setup which simply sends a string of emails over time. For some reason I am getting large amounts of the contacts who enter the first email being ignored and I can't find anywhere in reports or audit logs why these contacts are not
Hello everyone, I’m looking for input from anyone with experience using the Zadarma + Zoho CRM integration. Currently, I’m seeing that missed calls are automatically being created as Contacts instead of Leads. From a CRM perspective, this doesn’t make
Hello, I am trying to register a webhook in Zoho CRM programmatically (using the API). Specifically, I want to register a webhook that is fired when new Contacts are created in the CRM. I was able to setup a webhook using the UI, by creating a rule that
Since layout rules cannot be used with Subforms, is there another way, or is it even possible, to hide fields in a subform based on a picklist fields within said subform? For example, if the Service Provided is Internet, then I do not want to see the
When another user is sharing their screen with audio, I get echo from my own voice. We tested this with multiple users, with different audio setups, and there's no obvious way to fix it. Is this a bug you could look into, or are we missing something?
A custom function is a software code that can be used to automate a process and this allows you to automate a notification, call a webhook, or perform logic immediately after a workflow rule is triggered. This feature helps to automate complex tasks and
Analysis Period: August 19 - September 1, 2025 PROBLEM SUMMARY Multiple Zoho services are causing systematic SPF authentication failures in DMARC reports from major email providers (Google, Microsoft, Zoho). While emails are successfully delivered due
Hello, I am trying to update Tasks in Zoho CRM to make them recurring yearly, but I cannot find the correct recurrence pattern or way to update the Recurring_Activity field via API or Deluge. I have tried: Sending a string like "RRULE:FREQ=YEARLY;INTERVAL=1"
Is it possible? I have been working with AI on my desktop improving my application, and I have to keep copy pasting stuff... Would it be possible to import the DS file on top of an existing application to update the app accordingly?
When the user is in an active chat (chatbot) and is provide with an internal link, when they click the link to go to the internal page the chat opens again. This is not a good user experience. They have been sent the link to read what is on the page.
I'm working on making a custom view for one of our team's modules. It's an image upload field (Placement Photo) that would allow our sales reps to upload a picture of the house their working on. However, I don't see that field as a opinion when building
Hi Zoho, Hope you'll add this into your roadmap. Issue: For the past 2yrs our global team been complaining and was brought to our attention recently that it's a time consuming process looking/scrolling down. Use-case: This form is a service report with
Hello everyone! In the latest version(v3.9.37) of the Zoho Projects Android app update, we have introduced voice notes for the Tasks and Bugs module. The voice notes can be added as an attachment or can be transcribed into text. Recording and attaching
Hi In the Zoho CRM Module I have TRN Field I should contain 15 digit Number , If it Contain less than 15 digit Then show Alert message on save of the button , If it not contain any number not want to show alert. How We can achive in Zoho CRm Using custom
Hello Everyone, A Custom Function is a user-written set of code to achieve a specific requirement. Set the required conditions needed as to when to trigger using the Workflow rules (be it Tasks / Project) and associate the custom function to it. Requirement:-
Hello! We’re conducting a hands-on workshop series to help simplify appointment scheduling for your business with Zoho Bookings. We’ll be covering various functionalities and showing how you can leverage them for your business across five different sessions.
Hello Everyone I hope everything is fine. I've tried to To change the layout of the reports, especially the summary page report, and I want to divide summary of each section in the survey but I can't For example: I have a survey containing five different
I’ve encountered an issue while working with a journey in Zoho Marketing Automation. After creating the journey, I wanted to edit the "Match Criteria" settings. Unfortunately: The criteria section appears to be locked and not editable. I’m also unable
Hello, I'm not sure if this has been asked before so please don't get mad at me for asking. We're an NDIS provider in Australia so we need to draft a Service Agreement for our client. With the recent changes in the NDIS we're now required to also include
I would like to change the way our currency displays when printed on quotes, invoices and purchase orders. Currently, we have Australian Dollars AUD as our Home Currency. The only two symbol choices available for this currency are "AU $" or "AUD". I would
Hi, I see the code studio is "coming soon". We have some files that will require some more complex transformation, is this feature far off? It appears to have been released in Zoho Analytics already
Scenario : Deal Module having Multiple User Field (Presales Engineer) which having more than 1 User and through Deluge Script I need to get that Users Details and need to put into Multiple User Field (Presales Engineer) of Quote Module. Note: Both Module
Please consider adding functionality that would all a user to copy a reminder link so that we can include it in a personalized email instead of sending a Zoho reminder. Or, allow us to customize the reminder email. Use Case: We have clients we need to
This feature has been requested many times in the discussion Field of Lookup Announcement and this post aims to track it separately. At the moment the value of a 'field of lookup' is a snapshot but once the parent lookup field is updated the values diverge.
As a content creator I often want to include some information at the end of most posts. It would be great if there was an option to add pre-written footers, similar to the Hashtag Groups at the end of posts. For example, if there is an offer I'm running
My sales team wants to be able to add additional contacts for leads, how do we do that? Is there a different way we should be using the lead / contact functionality?
Dear Team, I am reaching out regarding a script I have implemented in Zoho FSM to automate the calculation of the End of Service date based on the End of Sale date in the Service and Parts module. Overview of the script: Fetches the End_of_Sale__C and
In Zoho CRM, considering a comapny as a lead, you need us to allow addition of more than one contact. Currently the Lead Section is missing "Add contact" feature which is available in "Accounts". When you know that a particular lead can have multiple
Hello everyone, As summer ends, Zoho Social is gearing up for some exciting, bigger updates lined up for the months ahead. While those are in the works, we rolled out a few handy feature updates in August to keep your social media management running smoothly.
I provide services, I do not sell items. In each estimate I send I provide a customized job description. A two or three sentence summary of the job to be performed. I need to be able to include this job description on each estimate I send as it's a critical
Dear Zoho Books This is not the first time but it seems to be 3 times per week now that the system is extremely slow. I work on Zoho Books 95% of my day so this is very frustrating. Zoho you need to do something about this. I have had my IT guy check
Hi Zoho Team, It would be really helpful if users could assign colors to project groups. This would make it easier to visually distinguish groups, improve navigation, and give a clearer overview when managing multiple projects. Thanks for considering
Hi Books team, In the Quote settings there is an option to convert a Quote to an Invoice upon acceptance, but there is not feature to convert a Quote to a Sales Order (see screenshot below) For users selling products through Zoho Inventory, the workflow