How to Comply with GDPR in Emails

“Email Just For You!”, i.e. personalized email compliant with GDPR.

In 2018, 3.8 billion email users sent 280 billion messages daily worldwide. It is predicted that by 2022 this number will grow to 333 billion emails per day. Email is a cheap way to contact customers - and its ROI (return on investment) rate of 42% is enough to ignite marketers' hearts.

In light of these colossal numbers, the importance of email in customer communication is becoming increasingly important, as is respect for personal data. Marketers want their message to stand out among the other 332.999 ... billion messages that are sent to customers every day. The current trend that can be successfully used in marketing mailing is therefore personalization.

“Customization” (i.e. adapting a product to the customer's individual needs) and personalization increase customer engagement, as by their very nature they support the development of deeper relationships with customers, ultimately resulting in higher sales results. This is possible in email marketing if individual choices are offered within standard frameworks. These standards facilitate communication between senders and recipients and allow email to be more flexible and productive.

Personal experience in email marketing and respect for personal data
What can marketers already do to personalize their emails more effectively in line with applicable GDPR directives?

Adequacy

Adequacy and customization

“Customization” is based on the degree to which the content of the email and the message itself match the recipient's needs. An email should always be tailored to the recipient's needs, because then it is relevant to that person. It must be sent with the right content, to the right person, at the right time.

Personalization

Personalization and recipient consent

Personalization is a more precise categorization within “customization.” Of course, this first requires having additional information from the recipient - especially with their consent, which is emphasized by the data protection regulation. Marketers may only use information that the recipient wants to be used, and they should make it very clear to the recipient that they work only with information that the recipient allows them to use.

One mechanism for obtaining such information is asking recipients for feedback or developing a creative campaign of activities in which recipients can provide their data. In this way, it is possible to obtain information about customers and their consent to the collection and use of data. This data can then be the basis for creating truly targeted and personalized emails.

More knowledge on how to approach the issue of customer feedback via email can be found in the topic raised by Leonie Jonker from Paula's Choice Skincare: "Building Relationships Through Customer Feedback". https://www.dotmagazine.online/issues/unleashing-creativity-in-work-life/the-future-of-email/customer-feedback

Avoiding “the creepy line”

The threat of crossing the "creepy line"

Without data on recipient behavior, personalization is not possible. However, this type of data is now subject to the strict provisions of the GDPR directive. Marketing specialists must ensure two things: they must comply with data protection rules and avoid the "creepy line" (less clearly defined and highly individualized).

In conversations with various players in the email industry - for example marketers or security specialists - it is clear that everyone knows what the "creepy line" means, but everyone defines it differently for themselves. That is precisely where the danger lies - marketers must put themselves in their customers' shoes. When we talk about the "creepy line," we mean that you, as a recipient, receive an email and can see from its content that the sender knows something about you that you do not want them to know. And that can be frightening for them. Once again: the "creepy line" that must not be crossed is defined very individually by each person. What I want a company to know about me probably differs from what you want a company to know about you.

Companies must therefore be very careful to maintain transparency and not use data that frightens their recipients and triggers an alarm in them: "Hey, where did they get this data? I didn't want them to know about that!" One possible consequence of crossing the "creepy line" may be recipients unsubscribing from the newsletter, and marketers do not want that.

And it is not only about whether the customer "wants" the company to know something - it is about whether the company even has the "right" to know it. This principle is based on the legal concept of consent set out in the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), for example: companies may collect only data to which the recipient has consented.

The future - personalized email.

The future and email standards

A number of solutions are on the horizon that could make electronic communication even more individual, relevant, and engaging. Looking into the crystal ball of the medium- and long-term future, email experiences are of course harder to define. In the medium term, it may happen that email will in fact be only a basic technology, a message transmission process for creating exciting customer experiences.

Perhaps in the future we will not even have an email client anymore. Data from emails will be delivered to us according to timeliness and direct relevance by AI (Artificial Intelligence) assistants, and our responses will be dictated rather than typed - an image far removed from our current email experiences. However, we will have to wait and see what the future brings in e-marketing and the IT industry.

In the near future, however, we see that the boundary between different marketing channels or marketing tools is blurring. For example, recipients can communicate via email as if they were on a website. Pilot projects in interactive email are currently underway. The advantage for the sender is that they can offer a personalized experience without requiring users to log in or connect online, and recipient interaction and engagement is much better. Users can view a photo gallery, write reviews, experiment with different colors, all without leaving email, as explained by Mark Robbins from Salesforce in his interview about interactive messaging.
https://www.dotmagazine.online/issues/unleashing-creativity-in-work-life/the-future-of-email/interactive-email

One project focusing on interactivity in emails is “Google AMP for Email”, launched in early 2019. It allows for dynamic email content and can do great things, such as introducing real-time data into emails. Returning to our birthday email, a sender using AMP can integrate into that message data such as today's weather in my hometown or the current real-time location. If it is pouring rain, the birthday offer could be 50% off a new rain jacket, whereas if it is sunny and 95°F, I might get 50% off swimwear. This will make some types of emails immediately more interesting to the recipient.

Email standards - why marketers should consider them sexy

Such innovations in the world of email are possible only thanks to the creation of standards that everyone can use. But email standards do not sound particularly sexy, and marketers are usually not interested in making sure their emails meet them. They seem more interested in beautiful images, great design, nice colors, and tracking capability.

Many marketers do not consider implementing technical details important to their industry. This is partly because they do not see the result immediately. This is the challenge we usually face when implementing a standard, new technology, or best practices: sometimes we simply do not see the result right away. And if you work in marketing and if you have scorecards to fill in and goals to achieve by the end of the quarter, there is nothing to motivate you to implement unappealing technical details.

So what are the results of implementing technical standards? The long-term result is that you can still send emails. And therein lies the problem: there are few motivating factors, but there is significant risk and long-term damage in the absence of standards. Therefore, we need to rephrase the question: What are the consequences of not implementing technical standards? The answer is: If you do not apply best practices now, you will have a really big problem in the future - your reputation may be destroyed, and that will be really difficult to repair. You may receive legal sanctions from your customers, and email service providers will no longer even send your emails, especially if you violate current legal standards on personal data. And if you have not set up a reporting system, you will not even notice it. The clear message is therefore a high risk of your deactivation.

Email security analysts have begun to understand the need to promote technical standards and are starting to talk with senders of marketing messages in a language they understand. The BIMI standard is a very good example of this. BIMI enables brands to display their logo in the recipient's inbox if the sending domain implements DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance) in a specific way. So if you have successfully implemented DMARC, your brand logo will be displayed in recipients' inboxes - and that is the language marketing specialists understand. I think this is the point at which the industry must begin to cooperate to make technical email standards sexy, as Marcel Becker and Seth Blank say in their interview "Email Revolution".
https://www.dotmagazine.online/issues/unleashing-creativity-in-work-life/the-future-of-email/email-transforming-customer-experience

Another standard under development is schema.org. The goal of schema.org is to build a "smart inbox," a digital assistant helping to manage emails. Initiatives like this have the potential to have a profound impact on email experiences in the future. The problem is that before a machine (email client or voice assistant) can handle an email, it must understand what its content is. While machine learning is already progressing in interpreting email information, schema.org can offer a better, more readable solution: it allows the email itself to state its purpose through additional markup and "meta-information." Branding in particular would benefit from this, because the sender then has 100% control over how the email is interpreted by various kinds of machines or smart inboxes.

CSA - supporting the development of standards

The Certified Senders Alliance (CSA) https://certified-senders.org/ promotes the development of standards and technologies that improve the quality of plain emails.

First, we set quality standards. This means that we review applicable law, such as GDPR, and talk with email service providers and senders, and thus with the email industry. We regularly update the applicable standards when necessary. The CSA criteria provide an excellent set of security best practices. That is how the theory looks.

Summary

Personalizing marketing emails requires knowledge of recipient data, but GDPR limits their use to those to which the customer has explicitly consented. It is crucial to avoid the so-called "creepy line," that is, a situation in which the recipient feels that the sender knows too much about them. The process of collecting information should be transparent and based on consent, and the data may come, for example, from feedback or creative campaigns.

The future of email marketing is interactive messages, made possible thanks to standards such as BIMI or schema.org. Initiatives like Google AMP for Email allow for dynamic content tailored to the current context. The Certified Senders Alliance organization promotes quality standards and helps senders navigate the area of legal regulation, which is particularly important in the context of GDPR.