Page 82 - Cyber Defense eMagazine January 2023

Don’t Put Up Walls Between your Contacts and Unsubscribing

As part of GDPR, the EU guarantees a “right to be forgotten” in regard to peoples’ personal data, and
you need to do your part to uphold this when sending cold emails.

Though in past years companies would often make subscribers jump through dozens of “are you sure?”
hoops before finally removing their details from a database, these kinds of practices are now a sure-fire
way to get fined under GDPR regulations.

The best way to make sure you’re guaranteeing your contacts’ right to be forgotten is to use a prominent
unsubscribe button as a universal element in all your cold email templates, and ensure that it will work
with one touch for all your audience segments.

Popular email marketing suites such as Mailchimp offer replicate template features which will make it
easy to implement core elements for GDPR compliance (such as your unsubscribe button and legitimate
interest copy) to a single starter template. Once all the right elements are in place, the template can be
duplicated and edited according to the specifics of the campaign, ensuring that every new marketing
initiative has basic compliance taken care of.

Establish a Database Maintenance Regimen

Last, but not least, GDPR stipulates that you can’t retain leads for a longer time than is necessary, and
that you can’t maintain incorrect data on the contacts that are in your database.

If you can’t remember the last time your CRM was checked for outdated data, then it’s time to schedule
monthly or quarterly update sessions that will keep it clean and compliant. This should involve deleting
any data from people who have unsubscribed, ensuring that source tags are both accurate and formatted
in a standardized way, and updating the pipeline stage a contact is at.

Seeing as you’re reading this guide, there’s a chance that some of these metrics may be head-scratchers
for the people in charge of your database, or that your records might have a lack of consistency that
makes them especially hard to navigate. To avoid these kinds of problems in the future, we strongly
recommend that you establish and enforce a data standardization process.

Data standardization processes are sets of rules and best practices that stipulate how data should be
entered into a CRM, including mandatory fields such as the time a new contact was logged, their email
address, data source, etc.

When all your future data acquisition follows a data standardization process, maintaining your database
in a way that’s both intuitive and GDPR-friendly will become much easier, and allow you to circumvent
the hard work that comes with manual database maintenance.

Cyber Defense eMagazine – January 2023 Edition 82
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