Unlocking GDPR Secrets: What Every Author Must Know Now Before It’s Too Late
The overall process has four steps, and I’ll use exactly their headings so you can look for them in their article. These are the key tasks you need to do:
- Enable GDPR Fields
- Edit GDPR Fields
- Segment Your List by Marketing Permissions
- Collect Consent
It’s worth taking a moment to say in simple language why you do each of those four tasks (at least as I understand things):
- The reason you Enable GDPR Fields is so that your mailing list now contains more information about each user. It has always contained at least an e-mail address, and probably also a name and other info. But now there will be information on exactly what “marketing permissions” each user granted you. There are a number of different “marketing permissions” but the essential one for you is “Email.” Your users now will explicitly grant you the “marketing permission” to send you e-mail. Or they can take away that “marketing permission” at any time.
- The reason you Edit GDPR Fields is because you need to decide exactly what your signup form will say. It will have some legal language. MailChimp provides you with suggested legal language. You can tweak it if you want. Or you can just use what MailChimp provides you.
- The reason you Segment Your List by Marketing Permissions is to make sure that after May 25, you only send e-mail to people who gave you a “marketing permission” to send Email. And what is a “segment?” It’s just a subset of your subscribers. MailChimp lets you choose a “segment” in many ways. One of those ways is to choose the set of all subscribers who granted you a particular “marketing permission.” Then when you send e-mail after May 25, you send it only to that “segment.”
- The reason you Collect Consent is because you’ve just changed your e-mail list to contain more information about the “marketing permissions” that your list members have given you. But as yet, none of them have specifically opted in to the precise GDPR language (using the words “marketing permissions” and all the legal lingo) that you just set up in your signup forms. So before May 25, you need to send out an e-mail to your current subscribers asking them to confirm their “marketing permissions” using this new language. Very likely, the reason they joined your list in the first place was because they wanted e-mail from you. But you may or may not have proof of exactly what they agreed to when they signed up long ago. Now if they update their settings on your new signup form, MailChimp will have proof of exactly what “marketing permissions” each subscriber agreed to and when they agreed to it.
MailChimp recommends that after May 25, you should not send e-mail to anyone who didn’t check the Email checkbox in your “marketing permissions.”
