Privacy Regulations & Preparing for a Review
Marketing tools continually improve ways to use customer data for more personal and AI-based marketing.
Legislators continue to generate privacy laws dictating how companies handle customer data.
If you haven’t reviewed your privacy policy and data storing practices, or don’t know them, then consider a review with legal and marketing.
Collect this information to prepare for that discussion and be sure your legal person is familiar with the laws. With this data on hand, you’ll be well prepared.
What countries and states are contacts on your list from?
Privacy laws are different for contact data collected from the US, Canada, the EU and even California. What geographic areas are your contacts from?
If you answered California, then you also need to know: annual gross revenue, if you have or project to have at least 50,000 California contacts in your system and if you make or project to make 50% or more of your revenue from selling contact data.
Note if you only collect US information and aren’t affected by California’s laws, your review will primarily focus on how contacts opt out of marketing and ensuring your privacy policy is current.
Where are all your data collection points?
Do you opt in contact data on your website, social media, at events and trade shows, on the phone with customer service, in your checkout process? You’ll need to know these in order to review what fields of data are collected and what the consumer is told they are opting in for.
What systems is information stored in?
Do you have one master system, like Salesforce, and all other systems are kept up to date via an API? Or do you have bits of information in different places?
How do you update the information, especially requests to opt out of marketing?
If someone calls customer service to opt out, or changes their email preferences, or modifies their address in their account online, how do all systems get updated?
Do you now, or might you in the future, share that data across tools for your own use?
Do you share data between external systems and marketing tools? Are your contact records loaded to email, social media, google ads, display ads or other programs for targeting and segmentation?
Do you now, or might you in the future, share that data for other companies to use?
Do you ever rent, sell or share data to another company to use? If you do a joint promotion with a sponsor, does the sponsor receive the list of contacts?
A copy of your privacy policy
This should be accessible on your website, probably in a link in the footer.