By azulfahri@hubspot.com (Asad Zulfahri)

Disclaimer: This blog post is not legal advice for your company to use in complying with EU data privacy laws like the GDPR. Instead, it provides background information to help you better understand the GDPR. This legal information is not the same as legal advice, where an attorney applies the law to your specific circumstances, so we insist that you consult an attorney if you’d like advice on your interpretation of this information or its accuracy.

In a nutshell, you may not rely on this as legal advice, or as a recommendation of any particular legal understanding.

It’s not enough to implement a few changes for data protection in your business and forget about it. As part of the GDPR, or General Data Protection Regulation that’s now in EU law, businesses need “data protection by design and by default”.

This means building data security and privacy into every aspect of your business’s data management strategy. From data capture to storage, maintenance, transfer, use, and cleaning, it’s essential to take care of your contact data ethically and securely.

While we’re not advisors on GDPR, we can follow the experts and present their recommendations. This includes collecting clear consent for communication, managing data securely, and implementing requirements such as cookie banners and privacy notices.

One of the most straightforward ways to meet these requirements is with GDPR compliance software.

GDPR compliance software helps businesses to manage customer data, consent forms, and data security. Some platforms also enable a company’s customers to edit the personal data that is stored or processed about them.

What is Personal Data Under the GDPR?

Personal data includes information related to people who can be identified from it, whether directly or indirectly. Pseudonymized data can help reduce privacy risks, but it is still personal data by this definition. The GDPR applies to the processing of personal data wholly or partly by automated means, such as a form on your website, or the processing of personal data which forms part of a filing system.

How GDPR Impacts Email Campaigns

When whispers of GDPR first started surfacing many moons ago, one of the questions that most perplexed business owners had was whether they could continue sending emails to their existing contacts.

As an email marketer in the world of GDPR, you need to collect freely given, specific, informed, and unambiguous consent (Article 32) before sending emails.

Adhering to data protection in your email campaigns includes adopting these practices:

• Requiring all leads to specifically opt-in to communications before sending email campaigns.
• Offering contacts an easy way for their personal data to be edited or removed.
• Purging contact data you no longer require or after the communicated storage time in your terms and conditions.

To maintain a clear oversight of all contact data, you can sync your current lead and customer data as well as their latest subscription and consent status between apps with a two-way data sync. …read more

Source:: HubSpot Blog

Author: Aaron