Marketing in a Post-GDPR World!

Marketing in a Post-GDPR World!


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:
  1. You've built privacy settings into the digital products and websites - and have them switched on by default.
  2. 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.

2. Consent Settings

The right to be forgotten has become one of the most talked-about rulings in EU Justice Court history. It gives people the right to have old or false personal data removed, and it has already been implemented with companies like Google, which was forced to remove pages from its search engine results in order to comply.



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.

Is your marketing GDPR compliant?


      Zoho Campaigns Resources


        • Desk Community Learning Series


        • Digest


        • Functions


        • Meetups


        • Kbase


        • Resources


        • Glossary


        • Desk Marketplace


        • MVP Corner


        • Word of the Day


        • Ask the Experts


          • Sticky Posts

          • 10 simple e-commerce marketing tips to boost sales

            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.

          • Marketing in a post COVID-19 world!

            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

          • Inbound Marketing 101: The Foundational Blocks of Inbound Marketing Strategy

            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,

          • How Zylker doubled their webinar registrations!

            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

          • The ideology behind why features tell, but benefits sell

            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

          Zoho CRM Plus Resources

            Zoho Books Resources


              Zoho Subscriptions Resources

                Zoho Projects Resources


                  Zoho Sprints Resources


                    Zoho Orchestly Resources


                      Zoho Creator Resources


                        Zoho WorkDrive Resources



                          Zoho CRM Resources

                          • CRM Community Learning Series

                            CRM Community Learning Series


                          • Tips

                            Tips

                          • Functions

                            Functions

                          • Meetups

                            Meetups

                          • Kbase

                            Kbase

                          • Resources

                            Resources

                          • Digest

                            Digest

                          • CRM Marketplace

                            CRM Marketplace

                          • MVP Corner

                            MVP Corner




                            Zoho Writer Writer

                            Get Started. Write Away!

                            Writer is a powerful online word processor, designed for collaborative work.

                              Zoho CRM コンテンツ






                                ご検討中の方

                                  • Recent Topics

                                  • Marketing Tip #2: Recover lost sales with abandoned cart emails

                                    Did you know most online shoppers don’t complete checkout? Automated cart recovery emails are an easy way to bring them back. A simple reminder can recover sales you’d otherwise lose. Try this today: Enable abandoned cart emails in Zoho Commerce and set

                                  • Billing Management: #9 Usage Billing in IoTs

                                    We live in a world where connectivity has become a lifestyle rather than a luxury. From smart thermostats that adjust your home's temperature to GPS trackers monitoring end-to-end fleets and sensors that optimize energy grids, the Internet of Things has

                                  • {"code":1038,"message":"JSON is not well formed"}

                                    Today this began failing: sales_order_data = zoho.books.createRecord("salesorders",books_organization_ID,order_data); with this error message. {"code":1038,"message":"JSON is not well formed"} This code has been running for two years. Here is the input

                                  • How can I migrate Shared Mailbox from Zoho Mail to Team Inbox?

                                    I am unable to migrate mails from my shared mailbox in Zoho Mail to Team Inbox. I am the super admin of my Zoho One plan and yet I am getting an error saying only admins can do this? I don't understand the issue.

                                  • Remember all the ways we've posted?

                                    The world celebrates World Postal Day in 2025 with the theme “#PostForPeople: Local Service. Global Reach". The story of the “post” is a story of human connection itself, evolving from simple handwritten notes carried over long distances to instant digital

                                  • Add Support for Authenticator App MFA in Zoho Desk Help Center

                                    Hello Zoho Desk Team, We hope you are doing well. We would like to request an enhancement related to security for the Zoho Desk Help Center (customer portal). Currently, the Help Center supports MFA for portal users via SAML, JWT, SMS authentication,

                                  • Can no longer upload my own Notebook cover

                                    I've had Notebook for over a year and have been able to create my own notebook covers, but when I tried to upload my own cover for a new notebook today, the upload feature has suddenly been starred, requiring me to upgrade my account. When did this

                                  • Zoho Desk - Cannot Invite or Register New User

                                    Hi who may concern, we encountered a problem that we cannot invite user or the visitor cannot register for a user at all through our help center portal, with the snapshot shown as below and the attachement. It always pops up that "Sorry, Unable to process

                                  • Custom domain issue

                                    I recently changed records for my support area custom domain for a few months, I then wanted to come back to Zoho, but now I can't connect it and I can't login as it's having an SSL issue. I cannot get a good response from support, as I've been notified

                                  • How do you generate personalized certificates and save them in dynamic folders using Writer's mail merge?

                                    Zoho Writer's mail merge feature can help you enhance the certificate management process. It's a great way to save time and effort! Merge certificates and maintain a well-organised repository with personalised certificates stored in separate folders for

                                  • Zoho Editor

                                    Zoho PDf Editor is not working I am clicking on EDIT PDf then it again bringing me back to the same page. again and again.

                                  • The present is a "present"

                                    The conversation around mental health has been gaining attention in recent years. Even with this awareness, we often feel stuck; the relentless pace of modern life makes us too busy to pause, reflect, and recharge. In the world of customer support, this

                                  • Market cap

                                    Market cap formula?? Kaise nikale

                                  • Need Help to setup plugs along with codeless bot buidler. To send sms OTPs to users via Zoho Voice and to verify it

                                    Need Help to setup plugs along with codeless bot buidler. To send sms OTPs to users via Zoho Voice and to verify it. I get leads from our website and we need to make sure those are not junk. So we are using proactive chat bot and we need mobile OTPs to

                                  • Direct Integration Between Zoho Cliq Meetings and Google Calendar

                                    Dear Zoho Team, We’d like to submit the following feature request based on our current use case and the challenges we’re facing: 🎯 Feature Request: Enable meetings scheduled in Zoho Cliq to be automatically added to the host's Google Calendar, not just

                                  • Zoho sheet

                                    Unable to share zoho sheet with anyone on internet with editer option only view option is show

                                  • Mail and OS

                                    Jai Hind! Zoho is doing good by creating good software (made in india) on par with other tech giants. 🥰 Suggestion: 1. Whenever we sign up on zoho mail its asking for other mail id. It shouldn't be like that. You should ask general details of a user

                                  • Personal account created under org account

                                    Hi there, I am Jayesh. We are using ME Central, and we have an account by the email ID soc@kissht.com.. Now I have created a personal account., jayesh.auti@zohomail.in, accidentally. Can you help me to remove this jayesh.auti@zohomail.in from my organization

                                  • Add another account

                                    How to add another mail account to my zoho mail.

                                  • Recover deleted user

                                    Hi by mistake i have deleted an added user and his email associated. Please help me recover it thank you.

                                  • No connection to the server

                                    Hello! I can't add a new email address to my mailbox because your server is rejecting me. Please help. I took and added a screenshot of this problem Marek Olbrys

                                  • Emails missing from desktop but visible on phone

                                    Subject says it all. Windows 11 laptop. Apple phone. all systems up to date.

                                  • Website Hosting

                                    Hello, I want to host my domain on Hostinger, and I want my emails to run through Zoho Mail. Please provide me with the SPF record, MX record (Type: TXT), and A record, so that I don’t face any issues with my emails. My website is on Hostinger hosting,

                                  • Can not search zoho mail after update V.1.7.0

                                    i can not search mail on to and cc box from attached picture and then search contacts box can't click or use anything. include replay mail too.

                                  • How to retreive the "To be received" value of an Item displayed in Zoho inventory.

                                    Hi everyone, We have our own Deluge code to generate a PO according to taget quantity and box quantity, pretty usefull and powerful! However, we want to reduce our quantity to order according to "To be received" variable. Seems like this might not even

                                  • Kaizen #211 - Answering your Questions | Using Canvas and Widgets to Tailor CRM for Mobile

                                    Howdy, tech wizards! We are back with the final post in addressing the queries you shared for our 200th milestone. This week, we are focusing on a couple of queries on Zoho CRM mobile configurations and custom payment gateway integration. 1. Mobile SDK

                                  • Remove "Invalid entries found. Rectify and submit again" modal

                                    Following up on a post from a few years back, but can the Zoho team consider either removing the 'Invalid entries found. Rectify and submit again' modal that displays for empty mandatory fields OR allow an admin to change it? I've built a custom error

                                  • No Functional Autosave or Manual Save Button

                                    Application : Zoho Notebook So I wanted to try Zoho Notebook(On Ubuntu) as an application, I installed the application and went solving my LeetCode problems visually(Drawing mode), at one point the app just stopped saving anything... Every time I tried

                                  • Cadence reports as front-end reports

                                    Hello everyone, We have built a cadence which is connected to the Leads module. There are 11 steps in total, 7 are automatic emails and 4 are tasks for the Lead owners. As admins, we have access to this (very nicely made) 'View Reports' tab where we can

                                  • Show elapsed time on the thank-you page?

                                    Is it possible to display the total time a user spent filling out a Zoho Form on the thank-you? I’d like to show the difference between the `form submission timestamp` and the `start time` (currently have a hidden Date-Time field set to autofill the date

                                  • Email Integration - Zoho CRM - OAuth and IMAP

                                    Hello, We are attempting to integrate our Microsoft 365 email with Zoho CRM. We are using the documentation at Email Configuration for IMAP and POP3 (zoho.com) We use Microsoft 365 and per their recommendations (and requirements) for secure email we have

                                  • I need to do crud with snippet html

                                    I need to implement a form with an improved user interface. I would like to use snippets to build a CRUD that allows me to create and update records. How could I achieve this using snippets?

                                  • Allow Stripe Credit Card and Stripe ACH payment methods to be enabled separately on an invoice.

                                    I need to be able to pick at the invoice level whether Stripe Credit Card and/or Stripe ACH payment methods are available. Currently, I'm not able to select from the two Stripe payment methods individually on an invoice. However, there are some larger

                                  • Resume Harvester: New Enhancements for Faster Sourcing

                                    We’re excited to share a set of enhancements to Resume Harvester that make sourcing faster and more flexible. These updates help you cut down on repetitive steps, manage auto searches more efficiently, and review candidate profiles with ease. Why we built

                                  • Incorrect “correct” password on email client apple mail

                                    I have troubleshot this account several times. I have deleted and re added account. It keeps saying incorrect password. Can you check that it is not locked on your end?

                                  • Is it possible to lock editing subform rows?

                                    Ideally editing would only be locked after the form has been updated but I still want them to be able to add new subform records at any time and they should be able to delete rows from the subform. It is a named subform if that's relevant however the

                                  • "Spreadsheet Mode" for Fast Bulk Edits

                                    One of the challenges with using Zoho Inventory is when bulk edits need to be done via the UI, and each value that needs to be changed is different. A very common use case here is price changes. Often, a price increase will need to be implemented, and

                                  • What is the maximum file size of a video upload in Zoho chat?

                                    Can I upload a 20 mb video file and share it with my colleagues? 

                                  • Update a field in ALL all calls under a contact

                                    HI guys! I have written some deluge code to update a field in my calls after i have comepleted the call, i need this field to update in all my scheduled calls as well that are comeing up. I just cant seem to get it to work, i have put teh code below,

                                  • Automatic Matching from Bank Statements / Feeds

                                    Is it possible to have transactions from a feed or bank statement automatically match when certain criteria are met? My use case, which is pretty broadly applicable, is e-commerce transactions for merchant services accounts (clearing accounts). In these

                                  • Next Page