Implications for newsletters and email marketing
Email marketing is a digital marketing strategy where you send email to a group of recipients with a specific purpose. Think of promoting products or services, building client relations, engaging subscribers, or stimulating people to take a specific action (filling out a form, visit a website, etc.).
A newsletter is a way to supply information or build and maintain relations with (prospective) clients and members.
Email marketing: when can you write to people?
You need to have a good reason or purpose for which to write to people. In legal terms, you need a 'basis'. To prevent people from receiving unwanted emails (spam, or even phishing emails), there are laws for email marketing. Some important aspects are:
- Consent of the recipient; for commercial emails, consent can be explicit, where the recipient actively consents to receiving emails, or implicit, such as when there is an existing customer relationship.
- Transparency and identification: It is important that commercial emails are easy to identify as advertising, and that the sender of the email is correctly identified.
- Opt out: Recipients of commercial emails must always have the option to unsubscribe (opt out) of any future communication. This unsubscribe option should be easy to find and to use.
Implications of the GDPR for newsletters and email marketing
Subscribers
To process personal data, you always require a 'legitimate basis' in accordance with the GDPR. This can be unambiguous and recorded consent, or a (sales) agreement, or the legitimate marketing interest of an organisation. This can be recorded in the processing log.
Writing to subscribers using newsletters
The conditions under which you may send emails are established in the GDPR. Some important conditions to note for sending newsletters:
- You either have unambiguous consent from the data subject, through a declaration or active action. (So not just a line in the terms and conditions that says the person agrees to receive the newsletter, or an already-checked box in the form).
- Or you have an existing customer relationship with the data subject. The condition is then that it is clear in every email how someone can unsubscribe. (This is automatically done in Laposta).