There are no two ways about it – marketing is all about data. Without data, businesses wouldn’t be able to send out marketing information by mail, target email campaigns, get in touch with old prospects or establish new customers. In our hyper-connected world, data is constantly being harvested from one place or another. And for businesses, that’s great. But the way we use data in marketing is about to change, thanks to the big bad wolf that is GDPR. But many businesses still aren’t sure how. So today, we bring you three ways GDPR will impact your marketing in 2018 and beyond.
It Will Change How You Collect Data
GDPR is all about consent, consent, consent. For years now, the default model has been ‘opt out’ – meaning that you could add people to mailing lists or collect their data through your website or services, and they could opt out if they didn’t want to receive anything. However, GDPR is flipping that on its head, and now ‘opt in’ is the default. This means that people have to physically opt in to your services, and affirmatively state that they are happy with you collecting, storing and using their data for the stated purpose. This means you will no longer be able to buy data and mailing lists (legally anyway), and you will no longer be able to automatically add the people you meet to mailing lists without specifically asking them first. Under GDPR, you have to be able to provide proof that consent has been given for that purpose, or you’re in breach. So you will need to change your approach to data collection – right from the way your sales team collect prospect information down to how your marketing team uses it.
Your Mailing Lists Will Be Useless
Because GDPR has such a heavy focus on consent, you will need to gather new proof of consent from everyone on your existing marketing database. Which sounds easy enough, but the bad news is that many of the people on there won’t give their consent. Many of them might not have given it in the first place. And more than that, the people who remain on that list can only do so if they have given express consent for their data to be used for marketing purposes. So you’re going to be left with a list of people who have specifically said that you can contact them with marketing material. And believe me, that won’t be a big list. May 2018 will be the month of the ‘unsubscribe’, with experts estimating that up to 75% of all marketing data will become absolutely useless. So if you’re big on sending out newsletters, or mail outs, or even cold calling for leads, you could suddenly find yourself in very hot water.
Prepare To Forget
GDPR not only tightens the rules of consent, but it also introduced hundreds of new rules around individual rights. This includes the ‘right to be forgotten’. This means that, if someone asks you to, you need to be able to destroy all information about that person, permanently. That means you need to know where all of their information is, otherwise you’re going to spend a long time searching for and deleting files. We recommend getting set up with a good CRM system to help you manage where all of your customer data is held.
At Greenaway, we specialise in helping businesses keep their data safe and secure at every stage of the process, but particularly the destruction end. Because we deal in data, we are working with many businesses to help them securely destroy all of their old marketing data in preparation for GDPR implementation in May. For more information, just get in touch with one of the team today.
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