If you’ve read our blogs or whitepapers before, you will already have a good understanding in what GDPR is, why it is important, and ways to be compliant. But to give you a short definition “GDPR is a regulation brought in by the European Union to strengthen data protection laws, giving people more control over their personal data and how it is used.”
One important aspect from a business point of view, from the GDPR directive, is the double opt-in process. This practice means that in order to contact a person via e-mail for marketing purposes, they must have double opted-in. Double opting-in is a two-step process where a person must register for your communications and then verify their subscription through clicking a verification link on an e-mail they receive upon sign-up.
You have to agree, getting people do this upon their own free-will sounds like a challenge! Yes it initially will be tough, as marketers, we are just so used to sending out communications to everyone in our database, but on the other hand it will definitely be beneficial as you will notice a significant increase in your open and click through rates. This is because we know that everyone we are communicating with wants to receive our marketing material. But how do we get people to double-opt in to receive our communications in the first place?
This is where the ‘Thank You’ comes into place… a fantastic tactic we have seen so far as a method for getting people to double opt-in is by providing an incentive, for example, ‘if you double opt-in to our communications you will receive a gift.’ The gift can be anything from a digital content, to box of chocolates and yes a piece of promotional merchandise!
At this point it really is up to you what incentive you choose to give away, if you do have incredibly current and valuable content that people would want to see and analyse, we recommend using it as it. By giving the user this it gives them an insight into the type of communications they will receive in the future (definitely would only recommend this for really valuable content, otherwise the incentive has no use). From a marketing point of view giving a promotional product works because not only will they be thankful for receiving the gift, but they will have a constant reminder of your company, and services, for them to recall upon when needed. In a recent survey by the British Promotional Merchandise Association, when asked how people felt when receiving a promotional gift, 79 percent of participants replied that they feel appreciated. That is almost 8 out of 10 people that value receiving a promotional gift, which definitely proves that distributing promotional products to thank people for registration would work.
Our last point to make is to reinforce the importance of valuable communications, because let’s face it; what you’re aiming to do is hold a database of current and potential customers. With the new GDPR directive, people have the right to be forgotten. This means that a person could easily sign up, receive their free gift, after receiving a couple of e-mails, can ask the company to delete all trace of them. These actions completely nullify the initial incentive, so it is incredibly important that once you’ve got your foot through the door, to keep their attention with good useful content, and even reward their loyalty down the line with further promotional incentives.