Post GDPR Predictions
Ok, so it’s here and whether you agree with it or not, we’ve all got to live with GDPR. These new laws have outlined how all of us collect, store and use our contacts private data. For some people this has meant making some pretty significant changes to how they do things.
So, what does this mean, what will we see less of and what will we see more of?
Spam
When we are talking about spam, we are talking about a sales-based emails being sent to you that you did not ask to receive.
I guess this is really the big one, if GDPR is effective in stopping people from collecting and using your private data without your consent, then we really should see quite a large drop in the amount of emails being sent to use that we did not ask for.
The fines for breaching GDPR are pretty huge, this this should stop the spammers from using your private info without your permission.
So, this should mean that over the coming months, as GDPR starts to have an effect, we should all see a dramatic reduction in the amount of spam emails being received.
Less people selling lists.
GDPR is really all about controlling and regulating how your private information, such as your email address is collected, stored and used.
When you check your emails, do you sometimes wonder why you are receiving marketing emails from companies who you’ve never heard of? – How did these companies get access to your email address?
Well, in many cases, your email address may have been sold many hundreds of times without you knowing about it.
Over the years, a whole industry has built up of companies selling and trading lists of email addresses. Whilst there are many reputable companies out there, that only deal in lists of people who have given their consent to be sent third party marketing, there are lots who don’t seem to observe those protocols.
Your address could be sold on without you knowing, you could have given it when ordered something or signing up to enter a competition, sometimes the originator of this list will sell your details on without you knowing.
As GDPR now regulates this area, it should mean that the number of these companies that trade lists without the owners of the email address knowing shrink dramatically.
The fines for a breach are 4% of global turnover, or 20, Euros, this really should put companies off of trading lists illegally.
Unqualified emails
Now I don’t know about you but my inbox is often full of emails that are selling products that are nothing to do with what my interests are.
It used to be the case that people thought that email marketing was all about sending out huge volumes of emails and hoping that enough people were interested.
This train of thought lead to companies sending out lots of emails that were prepared quickly and sent in large numbers. What this resulted in was an influx of emails promoting a huge range of products. The logic was, that if people were interested, they’d reply, and if they weren’t they’d ignore it.
Because it’s cost effective and very quick, lots of companies fell into this method of blanket marketing.
What happened though was that emails promoting products that we were interested in were lost amongst the huge tide of unqualified emails. So, we never acted on emails that we wanted, simply because we never saw them.
GDPR says that we must now ask our subscribers what they want to received emails about, this means that you can’t send emails to people promoting services and goods that they have not stressed an interest in.
More personalised emails
As we’ve looked at so far, GDPR may have killed off large scale bulk broadcasts to lists of questionable origin.
So, if these large lists are no longer being used, what does this mean in terms of wat we receive?
Well, it means that as we are often working with smaller lists, that we need to build up a better understanding of how the recipients react to what we are sending.
This means that companies will need to group or segment their lists into specific areas, based on how people react. So, it means that mailers that you receive will start to become much more tailored around your personal preferences.
This could be based on the best time to reach you, what type of layout your prefer, how you prefer offers to be structured or what type of products you like to see.
It means that we should see much more personalisation going on with email marketing.
Emails focused more on service than sales
Following on from the last area, targeted personalised emails will start to become much more focused around building long term relationships. The days of huge blasts of marketing followed by lots of people opting out are hopefully behind us – this means that the whole ethos of quick offers and quick sales are part of the past.
We should see that people sending email marketing are taking the time to build relationships with their subscribers, so we should start to see much more email marketing that is based around imparting information promoting a service.
As the focus is on relationship building then companies will now take the time to nurture a customer and gradually build a level of interest. So, we should start seeing emails that have a greater content focusing on delivering a service rather than looking for a quick sale.
In summary
Ok, so there we are, we’ve had a look at how GDPR is starting to impact email marketing. So far, it’s showing signs of completely changing the landscape and we may start to see some fairly major shifts in activity.