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GDPR & Preference Centres

So how does GDPR fit into marketing automation?

Well for some time now marketers have been working with ‘preferences’ for advertising and marketing to ensure they can personalise and provide customer experiences that lead to purchases. This has been done so far using email preference centres where contacts of different businesses have the ability to opt-out or tailor their communications.

GDPR has 7 key principles:

Lawfulness, fairness and transparency
Purpose limitation
Data minimisation
Accuracy
Storage limitation
Integrity and confidentiality
Accountability

On top of that the EU have pulled out a section which is important in today’s age of digital data and tracking — separate provisions in Chapter III. In short that is your rights as an individual.

Building a GDPR compliant preference centre

Preference centre’s are now much more than just email preferences, they’ve become our go to for asking not to be contacted ever again. Now with GDPR in the mix, we now need to tailor preferences, and allow the ability for contacts to request the following rights:

Opt-in and unsubscribe
Data export and transfers
Report a data breach
Policy or information requests
and, Data erasure.

The good news is setting up a preference centre isn’t so difficult, the challenge is ensuring your compliance and legal team are happy with the information collected, requested, and importantly how it’s held.

What is GDPR?

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is nothing new it was first established in 1998 and is often referred to as Data Protection Act 1998 (the 1998 act). But on the run up to 25th May 2018, it gained a lot of attention as the European Union’s revised regulation came into force. With one simple aim: improve privacy and give greater control to citizens over the personal information held by companies, and how it is used.

Not too big an ask right? Well one thing that the EU has stated is that businesses can’t use complex jargon and language to explain why they hold data on you, and what they do with it. It needs to be ‘clear and plain language’ ensuring it’s ‘concise, transparent, intelligible and easily accessible’.

Net result, as a consumer you choose who holds your information, how they contact and engage with you and if you don’t like it you can ask them to remove it.