No Means No: As it Applies to GDPR and Email Marketing

As email marketers we are now used to borrowing so many common practices that at first look it looks innocuos and normal to practice what we practice.

Its been long forgotten that these were tricks and sometimes downright devious techniques with clear (somewhat) evil intent.

Here is a bunch of things we do that borders on that.

• Prechecked email subscription content forms

• Hiding email subscription content elsewhere in a long terms & conditions document

• Charging a convenience fee to opt out of subscriptions

• Making it hard to unsubscribe

• Asking to fill up a long form to unsubscribe

• Unsubscribing in part rather than all newsletters from a company

• Asking subscribers to login to unsubscribe

• Asking them to visit multiple pages/multiple clicks before unsubscribing

• Asking them to type something in CAPITALS to unsubscribe

• Simply not recording the unsubscription

• Keep sending emails even though you tracked that they almost never open your emails

Compliance to GDPR is the opposite of all this. Which means genuine, clean and helpful intent with no agendas at every step. We have to think from first principles here and make sure nobody is getting emails that doesn't intend to get them.

At SendNet we follow GDPR guidelines very strictly and enforce them without any exceptions so that none of our customers are unwittingly buying into anything that violates the laws. SendNet is a simple platform that helps you send email newsletters at 1/100th the price of mailchimp using the Amazon SES service. Check it here.