We’re rascals, scoundrels, villains, and knaves. Yo ho, yo ho! No, I’m not talking about pirates; I’m talking about digital marketing and sales departments all across the country. In the open waters of list building, cold emailing, and digital ad targeting, we need someone at the helm to guide our businesses toward success.
GDPR has set the standard for businesses that operate in Europe and all signs are pointing to a new bipartisan push toward data privacy legislation in the US. That’s reason enough for sales and marketing departments to revisit internal policies and practices regarding data privacy. Just because we know we should, though, doesn’t make it easy to decide what we should do or how to implement change.
One of the hot topics in my office right now is cold emailing. Our UK office has to follow GDPR guidelines when it comes to outbound emails but in the US, cold emailing is much more of a grey area. The crux of our debate comes to this: I am in favor of adopting a permissions marketing strategy in which we only email those who have opted in to receive our content, but cold emailing works so it’s really hard to transition away from it.
So the debate rages on. Buying and renting lists is legal in the US, but is it the best way to approach sales and marketing? Most email marketing platforms argue that it is not. Here’s what HubSpot has to say, and Constant Contact agrees. All of these so-called experts are telling us to stop (please, please, stop) emailing people who haven’t given us permission, but emailing purchased lists works for many companies – what’s the answer?
The answer is: it’s complicated, but we need to put data privacy back on the agenda for our strategy meetings. Organizations have to work through these issues; we all know that. Consumers expect us to respect their privacy and they are becoming increasingly savvy when it comes to sharing their data. Congress is talking about data privacy and they will eventually push through new legislation. California has already put new data privacy regulations in place.
Many of these data conversations center around personally identifying information, credit card data, and encryption, but in the wake of the Facebook data privacy scandal, all aspects of how companies interact with consumers online should be reexamined. Permissions marketing changes the way companies think about procuring consumers information and how they interact with those consumers going forward.
Seth Godin wrote a great book that outlines why permission marketing is better for brands and better for consumers. The basic principle is that permission marketing offers consumers incentives to accept advertising voluntarily. It prioritizes building relationships with consumers rather than interrupting them with ads they may not be interested in. Moving toward permission marketing is a tough sell for many companies, but as data privacy becomes more top-of-mind permission marketing offers an interesting solution.
Whether your company decides to adopt the permission marketing or inbound strategy for your digital presence or not, let’s put our three-cornered hats away and choose the data privacy life.