Blueberry Marketing Solutions | What does GDPR mean for your marketing?

Kate Heron 7th November 2017

What does GDPR mean for your marketing?

All organisations that handle personal data will be affected by the new European General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) in some way. Whilst there is some fear around the impact of the new regulations across B2B organisations, it’s important to recognise the benefits too!

Although the same core rules as the existing data protection regulations, the new legislation will tighten up compliance for keeping personal data as well as buying it. Personal data includes any information which identifies an individual, so this will affect B2B direct marketing as well as B2C. Taking effect from 25th May 2018, businesses don’t have long left to ensure all data is compliant.

The regulations aim to strengthen individual rights and instill greater obligations on those processing data - but how can businesses use this to their advantage?

Although time will be needed to implement changes across organisations in terms of where data is gathered and the way it’s recorded, from a marketing perspective, it presents a perfect opportunity to achieve a more focused, cleansed and targeted marketing database.

Despite scare stories, GDPR is designed to encourage good marketing practices, and ensuring you are compliant can come with its benefits. GDPR wants to encourage a shift from a purely ‘tick box’ mentality and encourage businesses to think whether the people they’re contacting genuinely want to hear from them. As such, we can help you to understand how your B2B marketing database may be affected by the legislation and work with you to organise your data to help ensure it remains compliant.

Our GDPR data cleansing service is fully bespoke based upon your business needs and tailored according to the profile of your contact database. Our aim is to help you on the path to becoming GDPR compliant through steps including:

1. A Full Data Quality Audit - This may include some or all of the following:

PAF Matching
Telephone Verification
TPS Checking
Email Verification
Data Append Checks

2. Data De-Duplication and Consolidation - To condense your contact set and align data across departments in your organisation.

3. Data Profiling - Looking at fields such as industry sector, main business activity, employee size, region and postcode location to fill in any gaps in your current marketing database.

4. Customer and/or Stakeholder Engagement - Focused calling to update your database, remove gone-aways and obtain opt-ins.

5. Email Marketing - We can design a targeted lead nurture programme to help drive relevant content and maximise on-going engagement and further opt-in.

6. Data Classification - We organise and classify your data so that it’s in a usable format, ready for you to market to further and retain compliance going forward.

If approached correctly, GDPR can present the perfect opportunity to re-engage with your contacts. To maintain GDPR compliance, you will need to take steps to keep your data clean and up-to-date, as well as engage individuals with direct marketing which interests and engages them.

Find out more about our lead nurture services and how a bespoke lead nurture programme could help you market your business in a way that engages your audience. For more details on our GDPR data cleansing service or for a general chat on how GDPR could affect you, call us on 0113 487 7013 or contact us here.

Written By Kate Heron

Kate graduated with a first in Marketing & communications. She supports delivery of multi-channel marketing campaigns, ensuring that communications are aligned across telephone and email marketing channels.

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